


The High Iron Fist

by Shadow2Serenity



Category: due South
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Case Fic, Gen, PTSD, Season/Series 02, White Collar Crime, missing episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-18 02:18:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5894290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadow2Serenity/pseuds/Shadow2Serenity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fraser and Ray encounter a young woman who has just survived a murder attempt. A prolific artist with high-functioning autism, she doesn't understand why she has been marked for death and doesn't know who tried to kill her. As Fraser and Ray investigate, they find that the victim's life is still at high risk and the killers will be harder to identify than they think. (Set in the We Are The Eggmen/Some Like It Red timeframe.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is the Due South episode I would write if I had the chance. ;) MASSIVE 'thank you kindly' to dS_Tiff for beta-reading!

"No, I'm fairly certain it's your right front wheel, Ray." Benton Fraser stooped beside the wheel in question and took a whiff of the cold night air. "The odor of metal scraping metal is quite distinctive, and I believe you'll notice a marked reduction in the retarding force, not to mention a tendency to pull to the right when you brake."

  
Ray Vecchio rolled his eyes as he turned away from the gas pump on the other side of the car. "Okay, so the pad's a little worn down, big deal. What do you propose I do about it?"

  
"Well, the logical solution would be to make an appointment with your service centre to have it replaced," Fraser said, frowning at Ray. To him at least, the solution was terribly obvious - he didn't understand Ray's query in the least.

  
"Benny, not only do you not have pointy ears, but logic problems are the least of 'em," Ray told him. "You know how hard it is to find replacement brake pads for a seventy-one Riviera? They make that last window job look like a bulb replacement by comparison."

  
"Still, Ray, I submit that highway safety should take precedence over mechanical difficulties."

  
"You can submit to your heart's content, but I'm the one who has to submit six hundred bucks to get the job done. Now why don't you make yourself useful, come back here and submit some gas to the tank."

  
"Happy to oblige." Fraser ambled around the Riviera's angular rear end as Ray removed the cap from the fuel spout. He moved aside to make room for Fraser, only to find his friend hesitating, pointing wordlessly at the rear licence plate as if trying to choose his words with care.

  
"What?" Ray pressed.

  
"Well, Ray, I wonder if I could have the use of a clean towel."

  
"What the hell for?"

  
"Well, although I consider the nineteen seventy-one Riviera to be the crowning achievement of the General Motors design team, I'm constrained to point out the fire hazard created by locating the fuel spout directly above the left tailpipe."

  
"In case you hadn't noticed, it's never been a problem before."

  
"Just the same, Ray, a little peace of mind would not go amiss." Fraser smiled and Ray sighed. Arguing with the Mountie over a matter of highway safety was like arguing with a tree over how fast it should grow.

  
"All right, all right," Ray grumbled, turning to grab a fistful of paper towels from the windscreen-washer reservoir beside the pump. "Rate you're goin', you'll get a piece of _my_ mind if you're not careful."

  
"Thank you kindly, Ray." Fraser genuflected to position the towels strategically on top of the tailpipe and then stood up again, contemplating the triple nozzles on the gas pump. No more than a moment's consideration and he reached for the regular-grade nozzle.

  
"Benny, what'd I tell you about the care and operation of this vehicle?" Ray demanded, staying his hand.

  
"I believe your exact words were, 'Never, I repeat, never use the light - '"

  
"Naah, naah, naah, about the gas and oil requirements!"

  
"Ah. You insisted that top-octane fuel and twenty-weight oil were of the essence. However, Ray, may I remind you that that was your first car, whereas your second and then this one possessed a number of idiosyncrasies of their own...."

  
"Fraser, a Riv is a Riv. Just 'cause the VIN number's a little off from what it says on the registration is no excuse to pump it full of that regular eighty-seven octane crud. Now I'm gonna go in and grab us a couple of coffees, and when I come back out, I expect her to be purrin' like a kitten, _capisce?"_

  
"Understood."

  
As Ray nodded and headed for the convenience store at the centre of the gas station, Fraser turned his attention to the muted yet pointed growl that wafted through one of the Riviera's open back windows. He showed Diefenbaker decidedly little sympathy - he'd learnt long ago what a mistake that was.

  
"I seriously doubt he meant anything personal," he addressed the wolf. "Although insofar as he's not terribly fond of felines, I don't believe he meant anything by it at all...." Fraser let the thought hang and turned toward the pump as Diefenbaker pawed the back seat and then lay down, forlornly resting his head on his front legs.

  
"It's hopeless," Fraser said to himself, rolling his eyes. He repaired to the back of the car and crouched at the rear licence plate to commence the fill. As the pump ticked away the gallons, he glanced up into the clear night sky and gratefully inhaled the chilly winter air. So few Chicago nights - or days - so vividly reminded him of his far northern home.

  
Inside the store, Ray nearly bumped elbows with a man a few years younger than himself, wearing a reflective orange vest. Reaching at the same time for the coffee-cup rack, he hastily drew his hand away and stepped back.

  
"Sorry, mate," he said to Ray. "Go ahead."

  
"Yeah, no problem." Ray had half a mind to ask him where in Canada he was from, but preoccupied as he was, he let it drop. He filled two large coffee cups and headed toward the register, but quite suddenly he realised what he was bracing for when the high-pitched trilling of his cell phone emanated from his inner coat pocket.

  
"Aw, you've gotta be kiddin' me," he grumbled under his breath. He sidestepped to one of the snack racks to put down the cups and dig out the phone, rolling his eyes. "Vecchio," he answered, wondering who on God's green earth could be bugging him at this hour.

  
"Hey, Ray, it's me." Francesca - who else? "Hey, did you drop off that rental application at the mall for me?"

  
"Which one? The hair place, the shoe store or the lingerie boutique?" Ray said impatiently, half in disbelief that he'd been able to mention the last one by name.

  
"Any of 'em," Francesca answered testily. "A business woman's gotta diversify, didn't you know that?"

  
Ray rolled his eyes again. "Just don't diversify yourself into the lockup again, willya? I gotta go." Without waiting for a reply, he shut the mouthpiece, retrieved the coffee cups, and resumed his march to the cash register.

  
After he'd rung out, another young man in a reflective orange vest exited ahead of Ray, holding the door open for him. They exchanged pleasantries and the young man loped toward a short freight train stopped behind the store, its headlamp dim and its two engines idling quietly. Meanwhile Ray headed back to the Riviera, where he found Fraser still occupied filling the tank, peering into the spout.

  
"Are you done yet, Benny?"

  
"Any second now."

  
"Don't make me start countin'."

  
"That really won't be necessary. Taking into account your car's typical mileage per gallon, your accelerator usage and the two hundred and eight miles you drove since your last fill-up, the tank should be topped off right about.... _now._ "

The time between Fraser's proclamation and the automatic shut-off of the gas pump was indistinguishable. Almost indifferently he withdrew the nozzle from the spout and stood up straight, eyeing Ray inquisitively after he'd racked the nozzle. "Would you like me to check your oil before we go?"

"What are you, a Royal Canadian Mounted Car Mechanic now?" Ray's face twisted.

"Not as such. However, since your last oil change - "

"Let's go," Ray cut him off with a sigh. He turned away to swipe his credit card through the reader on the pump as a nonplussed Fraser repaired to the passenger side, tossed his hat onto the dashboard, and clambered in.

Ray took a long and satisfying draught of his coffee as he swung the Riviera out of the gas station and headed southward. "You know, Benny, even finding the brake parts is gonna be less of a chore than avoiding getting scalped by my own cousin."

"You mean Al?"

"Yeah, remember how hard he tried to milk me for this car?"

"I could be wrong, Ray, but I seem to recall you did very well at haggling with him."

"Yeah, well, ever since then, he thinks he's the king of Haggle Rock," Ray said wryly as he hung a right onto Cermak Road. "And at the rate I'm going with these babies, there'll be a day I won't even be able to get insurance on it anymore."

"Well, Ray, then I might suggest you not take any reckless action at this grade crossing." Fraser indicated the railroad crossing not a hundred feet ahead: already the lights were flashing and the gates were on their downward swing. The freight train that had been stopped behind the gas station had brightened its lights and resumed its southward journey.

"Relax, Fraser. I got it." With a surprising display of patience, Ray stopped well clear of the crossing, peering past Fraser at the train's brilliant headlamp. "Think you can do me the favour of keeping us clear of bombs, bullets, and open flames as well?"

"If it's within my power to do so, I'll guard your car with my life," Fraser pledged. He paused as the train's horn blared its crossing warning, and the two engines thundered across the road in front of them, still picking up speed. Despite the deafening volume, there was, Fraser mused, something about the bark of their exhaust and the scream of their main generators that he found oddly harmonious, he might even say pleasing to the ear. He glanced over his shoulder at Diefenbaker, who lay in the back seat with his head rested miserably on his front paws. As if Fraser needed any further proof that only selective hearing was to blame for Diefenbaker's inattentions.

"I'm gonna hold you to that," Ray said, raising his voice over the noise. "Which means no driving into the nearest blast furnace just for laughs, you got me?"

"What if we're in pursuit of a - " Fraser never finished, with his sentence neatly lopped off by an eardrum-rattling blast of compressed air being blown from the train's brakes. Alert at once, Fraser felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle with the unholy screeching and grinding of brake shoes locking against steel wheels. The train's speed reduced drastically, and it took Fraser no more than a microsecond to identify an emergency at hand.

"Ray!" he exclaimed. He snatched his Stetson from the dashboard, jumped out of the Riviera and dashed to the crossing, taking a flying leap onto a ladder on the side of one of the boxcars.

"Fraser!" Ray hollered as he heaved himself out of the car. _"Fraser!_ The hobo from hell is _that_ way!" He hurried alongside the slowing train - Fraser hadn't even heard him and was already three cars away.

Only when he judged that the train's speed no longer exceeded his maximum sprinting pace did he alight, running on along the side of the train. In another few seconds it had come to a complete stop, the crew had burst from the cab of the lead engine and dashed madly down the walkway on the engine's side. They hit the ground a split second ahead of Fraser's arrival, one of them toting a six-volt battery lantern as they rushed to the tracks in front of the engine.

A large plastic garbage can lay on its side between the rails: it appeared that the train had knocked it over and pushed it a few metres before stopping. The two crewmen crashed to their knees in front of it, aiming the lantern inside: what they beheld would surely have yanked a sharp and saline curse even from Fraser's mouth, had the conductor not beaten him to it.

 _"Ray!"_ Fraser roared at his approaching partner. "Call for backup and an ambulance! We've got a collision with serious injuries!" He stood upright just long enough to see Ray drawing to a halt and scrabbling for his cell phone inside his coat before he knelt beside the two crewmen.

Adrenaline froze even faster than the air as they stared into the wildly frightened eyes of a young woman stuffed tightly into the garbage can, wrapped in heavy chains, her mouth sealed with duct tape.


	2. Chapter 2

_"Emergency! Emergency! Emergency!"_ Bent over the control stand on the lead engine, the train's engineer almost pushed the radio out of its port as he pounded the transmit button. "BJ-Three calling DRS West, over!"

"DRS West dispatcher answering BJ-Three. What is your emergency, over?"

"We just hit someone on the Westchester southbound main, just south of Cermak Road! No fatality, but we need assistance yesterday!"

In front of the engine, the conductor had pinned his weight on the bottom of the garbage can to allow Fraser and Ray to pull the young woman out of it. Nefariously, she had been wrapped in a black tarpaulin and chained up into a ball with her knees against her chest, then stuffed deep into the can. Double-wrapped from shoulders to feet, she had no hope whatsoever of gaining any escape leverage: the perpetrator had also thrown a thick, dirty blanket over her head to render her totally invisible. Every exhalation came with a muffled, terrified squeak. Together Fraser and Ray extracted her from the can, gently manoeuvring her to a sitting position on the easterly rail.

"It's all right, miss," Fraser told her, trying to keep his voice calm. "It's all right. We're police officers. We'll get you out of this as quickly as possible."

"You got bolt cutters up there?" Ray demanded of the conductor.

"No, but maybe a fusee'll work," the conductor said. Without hesitating, he leapt over the rail, scrambled back up onto the engine and hotfooted it to the cab, while Fraser examined the loops of chain around the victim's shoulders.

"Maybe...." he muttered. He grasped the top loop around the woman's shoulders and started to work it upward, only for the woman to wince and yelp with pain.

"Easy, Fraser, easy!" Ray snapped.

"Sorry. Terribly sorry." Fraser gripped the victim's shoulders in a reassuring gesture and then moved over to the right one to try again at working the chains loose. Meanwhile, Ray carefully removed the duct tape from the woman's mouth - and at once she seemed poised to vomit. Her open mouth revealed itself stuffed with cloth, further stifling her voice so that her cries for help would have been almost totally inaudible. The sight of it made Ray so sick to his stomach that he almost vomited himself.

The conductor returned with what looked like a road flare in his hand. He slid down the stepladder from the walkway and struck the flare, searching the chains for a padlock until he found one dangling from the victim's ankles. With no more obvious starting point, he pointed the burning fuse directly at it.

"Sir, what's your name?" Fraser asked.

"Stanoski. Rob Stanoski."

"What did you see before the collision?"

Fraser's breath came heavy and ragged with the effort of working the chains loose. The victim winced and squeaked again, her left arm clenched close to her body. "I'm very sorry, miss. But you're almost free."

"Slade saw it before I did," Stanoski explained, nodding up toward the cab. "The can, I mean. I heard him curse, then he plugged the brakes, and then I saw this can in front of us maybe two seconds before we hit it."

"How about you, lady, what's your name?" Ray said to the woman as he extracted the last rag from her mouth. "And who the hell did this to you?"

Almost at once she sucked in a huge gulp of air, blew it out again and coughed heavily, hunching over, seemingly about to gag. She made no answer - didn't even look him in the eye. The only other sound she made was another strangled yelp of pain as Fraser finally loosened the chain and slid several loops up over her head, then unwrapped the top portion of the tarpaulin. Humanitarian sickness punched all three men in the gut again as they beheld nothing but a tank top hanging from her shoulders - and a giant purple bruise marring her left arm where the engine's snowplough had struck her, just before she clapped her right hand over it. Whoever had been so shockingly cruel to her must be shown no mercy, should they ever be found.

"Oh, dear," Fraser muttered. He glanced down at her feet just in time to see that Stanoski had superheated the padlock enough to weaken its mechanism. With a gloved hand he yanked it loose, whereupon he and Ray quickly worked to unwrap the bottom of chains and tarp alike.

"Whoever did this better hope and pray somebody else catches up with him before I do." Ray's voice sounded like he was speaking through a cheese grater.

"C'mon, let's get her up on the engine," Stanoski said. "The cab heat ain't great, but it's warmer up there than it is out here."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Fraser dissented. "She could have internal injuries, and until we know, it's not safe to move her." He unthinkingly pulled his brown leather jacket off and wrapped it around the shaking, panting victim, who gratefully clutched it around herself, hugging her legs to preserve every bit of body heat she had left. Just as unthinkingly, Ray reached behind him for the dirty blanket and threw it over her back.

Presently the engineer staggered down the walkway from the cab and joined the other four on the ground, taking a deep, shaky breath as he looked at the woman huddled in the centre of the gathering. His face was a mask of utter shell shock. Fraser glanced obliquely up at him, but Ray distracted his attention, pulling the blanket around the victim's shoulders.

"Okay," he said, rubbing them gently. "You're safe now, lady, you're okay. Now, can we try the name thing again?"

Still the victim didn't answer - she hunched over, clutching jacket and blanket tightly around her, shaking and breathing heavily. Fighting impatience, Ray went on: "Can you talk, or what?"

"I don't believe she can, Ray," Fraser said. "Traumatic experiences have a way of rendering an individual temporarily mute."

"Yeah, that's great, Benny. Now can we have that in plain American, please?"

"She's lost the ability to speak. It's an effect of trauma, but she should regain her voice as she recovers from her injuries." Fraser stared at the woman as she lifted her head and looked around the dark landscape, still shuddering. She wasn't exactly repulsive - she had a round face with soft features, and her dark, stringy hair just reached her shoulders. Her large and pale blue eyes, with high-arched brows, probably sparkled like starlight when they weren't wide and blank with fear. Her tan chamois pants were unstained, and she showed no psychological signs of rape, but her agitation seemed to grow with every degree her head turned.

At length Fraser stood up to face the engineer, who leant against the front of the engine and held onto a grab iron for support. He couldn't take his eyes off the victim, and his expression was one of profound anguish.

"What'd the dispatcher say?" Stanoski asked him.

"Just, uh - just wanted to double-check that there were no fatalities. Coleman's on his way. I guess he's gonna do the recorder."

"Oh, great. Better start guzzling your water, then."

"Sir, are you well?" Fraser asked the engineer, who shot him a disbelieving look.

"Me? What about _her?"_

"Well, she is alive," Fraser noted. "That's a start."

"She's damned lucky we stopped for coffee back there, though," Stanoski remarked, gesturing over his shoulder. "If we'd been going track speed, she'd be toast."

Ray nodded his head slowly as he recognised both men from the convenience store. To the engineer, he said: "Can you tell us your name, at least?"

"I'm, uh....Slade. Slade M-McCorrie."

"And you were first to see the can?" Fraser said, stepping to one side. He plunged one hand down to the bottom of the can to swipe its inside with his fingertips.

"Yeah. I wasn't really sure what to make of it. But a trash can smack-dab in the middle of the gauge like that? Last time something like that happened, I - "

He never finished. Looking up in Fraser's direction, the young woman suddenly froze, tightly clutching her arms and clenching her teeth. Almost ferally she sucked in great breaths and blew them out with catlike hisses as her face contorted with horror and she stared at an unidentified spot just over Fraser's shoulder. Then she leapt from the rail, pushed Ray aside and bolted across the tracks, stumbling down the embankment on the side.

_"Ow!"_ Ray yelped as his elbow struck the opposite rail. "Hey, hey, _hey!"_ He lurched after her a short distance down the tracks, Fraser close behind them, leaving the two trainmen swept with incomprehension.

"So much for the internal injuries," Stanoski muttered.

Not even fifty feet and the woman tripped and sprawled, crying out as her injured left arm took most of the impact. Try as Ray might to help her up, she wrenched away from him and scrambled toward the embankment on which the tracks rested. Meanwhile, Fraser shot a glance back up the double, side-by-side tracks to spot a kaleidoscope of red, blue, and white lights flashing back at the crossing. He dropped to the ground behind Ray, both flanking the victim as she plunged to her knees at trackside. Still shuddering, and now mumbling unintelligibly under her breath, she held her left arm close against her and started to draw a hodgepodge of criss-crossing lines in the snow with her right index finger.

"Knew I should've pushed for a hieroglyphics course at the Academy," Ray said offhandedly, watching the lines take shape under the woman's fingertip. He glanced up at Fraser, just in time to see him stare at his hand - the one he'd swiped through the can - and lick his own fingers.

"Oh, _Fraser!"_ Ray exclaimed disgustedly. "You wanna have a traumatic experience, watch yourself eat out of a dumpster some time!"

"Hmmm," Fraser mused, regarding his fingertips. "Oil and creosote. Very interesting."

"Yeah, and very _gross!_ What next, arsenic and old lace?"

"I'm not sure how that would apply...." Fraser's voice trailed off as he looked at the growing picture in the snow. The detail was impressive: the victim had drawn a multi-sectional building complete with roof lines, eaves, windows, and even cracks. She pulled back and stared, shivering, and Fraser and Ray stared with her, confounded.

* * *

 

Ray couldn't go near a hospital nowadays without thinking of the countless misadventures he and Fraser had been on, either in a hospital or on the path to one. Last time, he'd been devastated by Irene Zuko's death and he'd shuddered to think what the circumstances would be next time. Almost unconsciously he paced back and forth through the corridor of the ICU where the victim had been spirited away by the paramedics. It had been nearly fifteen hours since she was hit, but Ray and Fraser had scarcely slept a wink.

So far they had gathered that the victim was a woman in her late twenties, possessing no I.D., no notable blood toxicology, and still seemingly unable to utter a coherent word. The two young men forming the train crew were in the employ of Dearborn Rail System, a regional freight carrier offering nearby customers an alternative to the harsh rates imposed by the larger nationwide carriers. Their regular assignment was a peddler freight that picked up and set out cars all along the line from the western suburbs to the outlying towns south of Chicago proper. Slade had already been a nervous wreck when his supervisor arrived to examine the engine's event recorder, giving Fraser and Ray pause to leave the scene in the hands of the railroad men and attend to the victim.

Ray turned back toward the nurse's station just in time to see a short, bespectacled woman with coal-black hair and a white coat approaching with a clipboard in her hand. Fraser, sitting by the wall nearby, arose at once, sidling over to the counter.

"Ah, pardon me, Doctor...." He peered at the name tag hanging from her lapel. "Manheim. Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP. I was wondering about the young woman who was struck by a train near Westchester last night."

"Oh, you were the first responder?" Dr. Manheim surmised.

"Detective Vecchio and I were, to a degree," Fraser said, indicating Ray. "Is she out of danger?"

"Of freezing to death, yes. But the big question mark now is internal injuries. Surprisingly enough, the worst we've found so far is minor fractures in her left arm and her ribs. By the way, do you fellas know who she is?"

"Nah, we've only asked her what her name is five times," Ray grunted.

"It's Hannah Emerson. She's a commission artist with a studio up in Des Plaines."

"Hannah Emerson?" Ray repeated, frowning deeply.

"Oh, you do know the name?"

"Yeah, my mother swears up and down she's the love child of Norman Rockwell and Katherine Schmidt."

"None other," Dr. Manheim said with a slight smile. "My sister can't get enough of her work at charity art auctions. She keeps to herself for the most part, but her work is very well known around here. In fact, it seems like every architecture firm, business, and travel agency in Chicago wants a piece of her time these days. Who on Earth would want to do this to her?"

"Well, that's what we're hoping to find out," Fraser said. "Could we perhaps speak to her?"

Dr. Manheim hesitated, glancing at the desktop before her. Then she put down the clipboard and nodded. "I shouldn't, but I'll let you see her for a minute. _Only_ a minute. That's all."

"Understood. Thank you kindly." Stetson tucked under his arm, Fraser followed her down the hall with Ray bringing up the rear.

"How far has Miss Emerson's body temperature dropped?" Fraser asked.

"Not very," Dr. Manheim replied. "When she came in, it was just a hair over ninety-seven degrees."

"So she couldn't have been out in the cold for very long."

"How long do you figure?" Ray asked.

"Well, considering the ambient temperature, her apparel, and local wind speed, I would say no longer than twenty-five to thirty minutes."

"She's a hell of a lucky woman," Dr. Manheim remarked.

"I doubt she would have been if those two young gentlemen on the train hadn't been on the alert," Fraser commented.

They came to Hannah's nook in the ICU to find the lights dim, the curtains drawn, and Hannah herself lying on her side with almost every non-invasive medical monitor ever invented attached to her. Fraser quickly skimmed over the readouts: body temperature 98.1 degrees Fahrenheit, heart rate 78, blood pressure 135 over 75, respiration 50. Other than her temperature, considerably higher than normal, but to be expected after what had happened to her. Her heart rate spiked as her eyes fluttered open and she saw Fraser and Ray at the curtain, with Dr. Manheim just behind them. At first she caught her breath, but the longer they kept their distance, the easier she breathed. As she grew calmer and her face softened, all three of them could see for the first time that she was a very pretty woman indeed. Finally Fraser took a slow step forward.

"Miss Emerson?" he said softly. "I'm Constable Fraser, this is Detective Vecchio. Have you any recollection of who did this to you?"

Hannah swallowed hard, her gaze flicking toward a pad of notepaper and a pencil on the bedside table. "Who's on first," she muttered finally. "I found out. I know who's on first. The demon."

"The demon? Who is the demon?" Fraser asked.

"Who _are_ the demon." Hannah squinted, as if taking umbrage. "Who's on first? The demon are on first. I know it. It'll come down around everyone's ears."

Frowning, Fraser looked at Ray. Baffled, Ray looked at Fraser. Hannah's words, bordering on delirium, were enough to tell them they wouldn't get anything else from her right now, not until she'd had time to recover. With an incline of Fraser's head, they turned together to leave as Dr. Manheim slid the curtains shut.

"'Who are the demon'?" Ray repeated morosely as Dr. Manheim led the way back down the hall. "Guess that's why she's an artist and not a writer."

"On the contrary, she's also quite the poet," Dr. Manheim said.

"Yeah, okay, so what was with that 'who's on first' business?"

"I believe she was referencing the classic Abbott and Costello sketch 'Who's On First'," Fraser offered.

"Yeah, so who the hell tried to kill her, some deranged Cubs fan?" Ray said, tossing up his hands.

"Can you presume a motive?" Fraser asked.

"Well, not unless they lose the World Series to the Red Sox this year."

"You know, nothing is impossible, Ray. Like most any other game, it's a game of chance."

"Yeah, well, even in Canada, you can't break the laws of physics or nature. And if anything's against the laws of physics and nature, it's the Cubs ever winning the Series, at least while I'm alive."

Before they had even passed by the nurse's station, Hannah had reached for the pad of paper and the pencil on the bedside table with her good arm. Swallowing hard, her fluttering heart rate passing through her ears unnoticed, she started to sketch, vertical lines and horizontal lines and then squares and rectangles filling in the shape. Then, working as fast as her hand would move, she shaded the sketch: hatching, then stippling, creating another drawing to augment the one she'd made in the snow. She wished fleetingly that the policemen had stuck around just for another minute. She had so much to show them....so much to show everyone. 

* * *

 

_Dohmaaahhhhh...._

"Look, Benny, the Red Sox haven't won a pennant since nineteen eighteen, okay? Do the math. Law of averages. It's been almost eighty years. What does that tell you?"

"Only that fortune favoured the opposing team." Fraser wasn't sure why they were still talking about baseball after three hours and a late lunch, but he enjoyed conversing with Ray on most any subject. "However, the ripple effect does still warrant a moment's consideration. For example, the end of Senator Johnstone's political career and the impact it will have on this coming presidential election. Or, for that matter, what we might find at the starting point on the path to the attempt on Miss Emerson's life."

"Ready? Go." Ray paused at the door to Hannah's apartment, but just as he reached for the knob, he paused and eyed the jamb with a frown.

"That door's been forced," Fraser observed. "Multiple times, if the gouge marks are any indication."

"Well, at least somebody doesn't care how it'll impact the presidential election," Ray grunted. He opened the unresisting door and led the way inside.

The apartment, a studio opening off the south hallway of a renovated textile mill, was gigantic by any standard. The late-afternoon sun poured through three large, arched, multi-paned windows in the outer wall. It boasted a cathedral ceiling, oak wood framing, a loft above the kitchen and dining section, and a spacious living area. However spacious it was, though, the countless works of art resting on easels reduced the elbow room considerably. Pencil drawings, graphite, charcoal, pastel, paintings - just about every visual medium ever created had a presence. In the far corner, several Christian-themed creations were clustered beneath a wood and porcelain crucifix hanging on the outer wall. There were bookshelves against that and every other wall, several of them topped with rows of black hidebound journals, each one labeled with a poetically cryptic name. The smell of paint hung strongly over the entire apartment, a pungency not lost on the grumbling Diefenbaker.

"You know, Dief," Fraser told him, "one of these days we'll be investigating a pig farm and you'll wonder what you were complaining about. But I have to say I agree with you."

"Yeah, smells like a distillery in here," Ray concurred.

"Hmmm. I can distinguish the scents of oil, acrylic, watercolour. It would appear Miss Emerson is quite prolific." Fraser peered into the kitchen, noticing a stainless steel teakettle precisely centred on its burner, and a mug of cold tea on the counter beside it.

"She's got one hell of a crush on Tom Cruise, by the look of it," Ray noted, regarding a wall almost entirely covered with superdetailed drawings of the actor.

"And Dustin Hoffman, too, apparently." Fraser indicated a neat row of drawings hanging on the edge of the loft level.

"Dustin Hoffman?" Ray moved over to join Fraser with a mental bell ringing deafeningly in the back of his head. "Sure that's not James Darren?"

"No, I'm very certain it's Dustin Hoffman. As certain as I am that your name is Raymond Vecchio."

"Raymond...." Ray's eyes widened and he looked at Fraser with a face full of epiphany. _"Rain Man!"_

_"Rain Man?"_ Fraser repeated.

"Yeah, you ever see it?"

"I can't say as I have, no."

"It came out about eight years ago. Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman played these two brothers. Their old man died and left all his money to Dustin Hoffman. So Tom Cruise hightailed it to Cincinnati to find out what the deal was, and he found out Dustin Hoffman was his brother and he was autistic. One of his obsessions was quoting 'Who's On First' and wondering who was 'who'. Tom Cruise spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what made him tick."

"I see," Fraser said, his voice slow and distant. "Yes, I see."

"See what?"

"Miss Emerson has an obvious fixation on those two actors, probably on the film as well. Notice how highly detailed her works are, as a rule. Her art is well-known in Chicago, her kitchen and dining areas are organised with almost inhuman precision, and so far we haven't had much luck communicating with her."

"Yeah, well, it's not like there's much of a language barrier there."

"No, but there is a neurological one. I think Miss Emerson has autism, Ray. Even if she knows who tried to kill her, I doubt she understands why."

"Who tried to kill her?" The panicked feminine voice drew Fraser and Ray's attention back to the door. A short, middle-aged, dark-haired woman in slacks and a light purple sweater stood just inside the doorway, her hands clasped fearfully in front of her.

"We're not sure yet, ma'am," Fraser replied. "Do you know Miss Emerson?"

"Know her? Hannah is my daughter! What do you mean, someone tried to kill her?!"

"She got hit by a train last night," Ray came straight to the point. "It wasn't an accident. Someone set her up. Now she's alive and she's recovering, but - "

"Oh my God!" Mrs. Emerson gasped, clapping both hands to her mouth. "My baby! Where is she, I've got to go to her!"

"She's at St. Helen's Hospital," Fraser said, stepping forward with one hand outstretched. "She's out of danger, and she's under intensive care. Mrs. Emerson, please try to stay calm."

"Stay calm! How do you think you would take it if it was your child in there?!"

"Ma'am, I assure you, I completely understand," Fraser told her. "But Hannah is receiving medical attention as we speak, and Detective Vecchio and I are investigating what happened to her." His face softened, and he gently touched Mrs. Emerson's hand: it shuddered severely, but then she pulled in a deep, shaky breath as she looked from him to Ray and back to him again.

"Detectives...." she repeated mutedly.

"Er, actually, I'm Constable Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Would you mind answering a few questions?"

Whether it was Fraser's calming tone or the compassion in his face, Mrs. Emerson's nerves cooled just enough for her to nod. She moved an easel aside and sat in a chair, trembling. Fraser moved over to stand beside her for support as Ray produced his notebook.

"Okay, um....does Hannah have a roommate, boyfriend, painting buddy, anything like that?" he began.

"No," Mrs. Emerson said with a perceptible tremor in her voice. "She prefers her solitude, especially when she's working. If anything breaks her concentration, she goes to pieces, the poor child."

"She's able to care for herself, though," Fraser probed.

"For the most part. But when she's confronted with something adverse or extraordinary...." Mrs. Emerson paused and looked up at Fraser strangely. "That's an odd question. Why do you ask?"

Slowly licking his lower lip, Fraser took a deep breath. "When was Hannah diagnosed with autism?"

Immediately Mrs. Emerson dropped her gaze and stared at the stairway to the loft. Several long seconds passed whilst she collected herself with a deep breath and swallowed. "She was already seven years old. February second, nineteen seventy-eight. I remember it like this morning. Suddenly everything made so much sense. But until then, Lord forgive me, I had no idea what to make of her. First they said it was 'idiot savant syndrome,' but Hannah was _not_ an idiot. Then they said it was a 'learning disability', but I couldn't buy that, not with the way she excelled at her English and art classes. She wasn't a typical girl, ever. She wasn't happy unless she was reading, drawing, or going to see 'Star Wars' at least once a week after it came out. And her classmates showed her no mercy....I so wanted to enroll her in a Montessori school, but we could never afford it."

Fraser glanced at Ray to see his friend leaning against a solid oak table beneath the Tom Cruise montage. Ray had deeply sunk into a serious, pensive mood, staring at the floor as if the story had struck a chord deep within him. Turning back to Mrs. Emerson, Fraser searched his brain for another question. The only one he could think of, he already knew the answer to, but perhaps Mrs. Emerson's perspective could broach another clue.

"How does her autism manifest itself?"

"Just look around," Mrs. Emerson said, waving her hand about the forest of easels in the living area. "These are all Hannah's personal projects, but she does this for a living, you know. And she makes an excellent living at it."

"Yes, I've noticed her attention to detail is nothing short of astounding," Fraser said.

"Not only is she extremely detail-oriented, but she works fast. She once offered three concepts for a children's museum to an architecture firm within two days. The one they settled on, they....wait a minute." Mrs. Emerson's voice trailed off as she looked across the apartment. Alert, she rose, crossed toward the far wall and picked up an easel lying flat on its back. "She never lets this happen," she said absently. "She considers it sacrilege to let one of these fall over."

Fraser and Ray exchanged a look - maybe that was a clue in itself. "When was the last time you saw her?" Ray asked quietly.

"Just the other day. We met up for coffee. She told me about a commission she'd taken from a travel agency to paint a panorama of the Chicago skyline at dawn."

"You know if she met anybody else? Like a sibling? Her father?"

"Why would she waste time looking for _him?"_ Mrs. Emerson returned with a disdainful sniff. "Last time I spoke to that bastard, Jimmy Carter was still president. After we found out, I encouraged Hannah to be the best artist in the world, to do something she loved and was really good at - only for him to tell her she'd never amount to anything with her 'condition', as he so politely put it. Not a day goes by I don't wonder if Hannah would have turned out any differently if he hadn't stunted her growth. He was always brushing her aside, blaming her for every trip to the principal's office. He couldn't deal with her differences or he didn't even try, and to this day I don't know and I don't care which one it was. All I know is that we both agreed to a quick and easy divorce."

Fraser looked at Ray again, but Ray said nothing, once more staring at an undefined spot on the floor. At length Mrs. Emerson straightened up and started toward the door. "I need to go and see my daughter now."

"Very well," Fraser said. "Thank you very kindly for your time."

Finally Ray moved, dipping into his coat pocket. "Look, if she remembers anything, if she says anything to you, I'd appreciate it if you'd give me a call," he said, his tone bordering on sullen as he passed her a business card.

She passed a cursory eye over it and then slid it into her hip pocket. "And I'd appreciate it if you find out who did this to her," she replied tersely. Nodding her head once, she turned aside and exited the apartment apace.

* * *

 

Heading back across town toward the consulate, Fraser eyed Ray, who sat in the driver's seat completely rock-still but for his wheel hand and accelerator foot. He hadn't said two words since they left Hannah's apartment, and he looked at nothing but the road, not even the speed limit signs or the yields. Not two minutes after crossing the boundary into the west side, he drove obliviously through a yield sign and cut off an irate motorist who had the right of way. That tore the book in half, Fraser decided - he was long overdue to say something.

"Ray, what's troubling you?"

"Nothin'."

"I'm sorry if I find that difficult to believe."

"Oh, you do, do ya? Great, go rat me out to Welsh."

"Do you think he needs to know about it?"

"I think we need to stop talkin' about this."

Fraser bridled. Even in the worst of times, Ray never stonewalled him this hard. Watching his behaviour throughout the morning, this had to have something to do with what they'd learnt about Hannah's youth.

"You'll have to forgive me, Ray," Fraser said, scratching his eyebrow. "But I feel that our friendship does reside within the purview of - "

"Fraser, what'd I just say?" Ray cut him off, glaring. "It's nothing. Now drop it."

Fraser clammed up, not even offering a word of acknowledgement or understanding. He'd get nothing else from Ray, he realised. He remained silent for the rest of the drive, all the while ruminating on what could possibly have upset his friend to such depths.

* * *

 

"The Musical Ride will be coming to the South Shore region on an exhibition tour early in April," Inspector Thatcher informed Fraser as they viewed the contents of the open folder on his desk. "I'd like you to start making preliminary arrangements. They're expected to depart Thunder Bay by train and cross the border at Sault Ste. Marie. I want you to coordinate with U.S. Customs and route the train to Chicago with least possible delay."

"Yes, ma'am," Fraser said. "Do you happen to have a contact number for U.S. Customs in Sault Ste. Marie?"

"I do." Thatcher reached for the pen cup on Fraser's desk, but her hand froze solid as Fraser reached toward it simultaneously. His hand stayed in unison with hers - bare millimetres from touching it. For a long, awkward moment they stood like that, staring each other in the eye, until at last Fraser broke the stare and raised his hand in concession.

"I beg your pardon," he muttered. Thatcher, however, stared at him for another overweight second before she finally plucked a pen from the cup and uncapped it.

"I want to leave nothing unexpected," she said pontifically as she jotted down the phone number. "I want no snowbank undisturbed, no hockey rink unexplored, no maple tree untapped. You understand, Constable, that the Musical Ride is this force's flagship. We're showing the Americans our best face, and I will _not_ see us fall on it." She fixed Fraser with a dagger-like stare as she stood up straight to face him.

"Understood," Fraser said. He hesitantly slipped the pen from Thatcher's upheld hand and bent over the folder as she left his office. He slipped a map from his desk drawer and half unfolded it to view the Upper Great Lakes region. Peering closely at the upper peninsula of Michigan, he made out that the Canadian Pacific Railway owned the main rail link at the border. The central U.S. division would....

_CP Rail._

Fraser suddenly found himself wondering where, or if, the CP interchanged with Dearborn Rail System. Then his stream of consciousness came to rest on the two young men they'd met last night. How were they holding up? How was Hannah doing? Was Ray still upset? His assigned duties notwithstanding, the previous afternoon's spat still bothered Fraser. He got as far as writing down the names of all eight Class I railroads with a presence in Chicago before he swapped the pen for his desk phone, dialing a long-familiar number.

"Squad room, Elaine Besbriss."

"Ah, good morning, Elaine. It's Constable Fraser."

"Oh, hi, Benton."

"Is Detective Vecchio by any chance on the premises?"

"Uh, he was here, but I haven't seen him for a couple of hours. Want me to try him on his cell?"

"No, that won't be necessary. I'll be by to see him this afternoon. Thank you kindly, Elaine."

Fraser hung up the phone and sagely eyed his paperwork again. Now that he had two train-related tasks on his mind, he knew he'd be able to focus on only one of them. He arose, plucked his Stetson from its rack and tiptoed to the door of his office. No sign of Inspector Thatcher - but Diefenbaker was ever present to growl his disapproval.

"Shh," Fraser hissed. As quietly as he could muster, he closed his office door and stole off to the stairs with Diefenbaker at his heels.

* * *

 

The walk from Cermak Road to the site of the collision seemed much longer without a train to ride on. Still, Fraser stayed well clear of the double tracks to one side, keeping his eyes open for footprints as he walked slowly along the right-of-way. He saw nothing, and Diefenbaker smelled nothing: at great length they reached the spot where the trash can had been knocked over and pushed in front of the train, leaving a wide imprint in the snow between the rails. From end to end, the imprint was no longer than a hundred feet. Fraser smiled inwardly: if the distance to a complete stop was that short, the train could have been going no faster than five or six miles per hour at the point of impact. Hannah's injuries couldn't be too severe - the worst of it would be the trauma of being struck.

Looking carefully both ways, Fraser crossed the easterly track and walked between the dual tracks to the spot where Hannah had fallen over and drawn her picture in the snow. It had been obliterated, literally blown away by high-pressure air if Fraser was reading the striations in the surrounding snow correctly. A nondescript bare patch of stone ballast marred the snowscape in its place. No clues left to be found here - not even any footprints except his, Ray's, and Hannah's.

It was as if a ghost had drifted over the tracks to leave Hannah to become one herself. And even if there was a more reasonable explanation, the lack of other prints still bothered Fraser to his core.


	3. Chapter 3

Ray entered the squad room at the main door just as Elaine turned away from a nearby filing cabinet with a stack of folders in her hands. "Oh, there you are," she hailed him. "Fraser called looking for you this morning, and your sister was here not long after with another big thick envelope."

"Great," Ray grumbled. "Anybody else wanna pull me by what little hair I have left?"

"Well, not so far...."

 _"Vecchio!"_ The squad room's window panes rattled under the boom of Harding Welsh's voice erupting from the other side.

"There it is," Elaine said with a wry smile. Sighing, Ray steeled himself and crossed the room to the lieutenant's office.

"You hollered, sir?" he asked.

"I got a call from St. Helen's Hospital regarding a Ms. Hannah Emerson, whose attempted murder you're apparently investigating without my knowledge," Welsh said conversationally.

"Any word on how she's doing, sir?"

"She's doing quite well as of an hour ago. I thought you'd like to know since you've so zealously taken the liberty of assigning yourself to this case."

Ray winced - he might have known he'd just be reprimanded for using his initiative. "Sir, we were in the right place at the right time, okay? The train that hit her was right in front of us, and then when we - "

"Wait, wait, wait, wait," Welsh interrupted, waving his hand. "What do you mean, 'we'?"

"What do you mean, what do I mean?"

A pained expression crossed the big lieutenant's face. "The Mountie is not involved in this, is he?"

"Uhh, not if I can help it, sir."

"That's what worries me. Well, Detective, if you feel you're up to handling Miss Emerson's case, I'm sure I can spare you from crossing-guard duty long enough for you to manage it."

The inference hung from Welsh's smirk like a mouthful of fettucini. Narrow-eyed, Ray enquired: "Will that be all, sir?"

"That's all, Vecchio. Oh, and by the way, you might advise your little sister that the next time she comes waltzing in here with an envelope full of rental applications for retail space, she can at least make sure they're not drenched in Chanel Number Five. I'd like for this to still smell like a police station at the end of the day."

"Well, you know Frannie, sir," Ray said with a forced smile as he turned to leave. "Brightening up the world one perfume bottle at a time."

"Well, as long as she leaves my station out of it, I'll retire a very happy man," Welsh returned. He dropped his attention back to the mountain of paperwork on his desk, trying not to dwell on the thought of Francesca Vecchio turning his station upside down - let alone how far the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would come behind her.

Without another word, Ray exited the office and marched back around the corner to his desk. He almost hit Fraser head-on as the Mountie emerged from the side entrance to the squad room, and there they both stood, silently facing each other for several seconds, waiting for the other to speak first.

"Ray?" Fraser said finally.

"Is Welsh looking?" Ray said without breaking his gaze.

"No."

"Good. Break room. Let's go." He clapped Fraser on the arm and strode past him out the side door. Relieved that Ray appeared to be upset with him no more, Fraser turned to follow.

"Sorry about yesterday, Fraser," Ray called over his shoulder. "Just feeling a little edgy, that's all."

"No apologies necessary, Ray. I supposed something about our conversation with Mrs. Emerson was bothering you. I went back to the crime scene earlier today, but I was unable to spot any footprints other than our own. The only conclusion I can reach is that someone with a superior sense of balance walked the top of the rail from the crossing to the point of impact."

"With a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman crammed into a garbage can?" Ray said sceptically.

"Nothing else makes any sense to me. Also, Hannah's drawing is gone. It's been blown from the ground by what I believe was a high-pressure pneumatic instrument. By the way, is there any news on her condition?"

"Yeah, she's doing okay, last I heard."

"Good. Perhaps if we visit her later on, she'll be ready to answer some questions."

"Aah, don't get your hopes up, Fraser. You said it yourself, she probably doesn't even know who tried to kill her or why. Besides, you know as well as I do that an autistic kid can only handle the pressure for so long when she's at her best."

"She's not really a kid, at least not physically. Even her mother acknowledges that she's capable of taking care of herself. So as motives go, I think we can rule out an inability to conduct her own affairs."

"Yeah, but other than that, all we know about her is that she suffers from autism and she's really good at painting things. So where's the motive in that?" Ray passed Fraser a tuna-fish sandwich from the vending machine and went to work extracting a prosciutto for himself.

"Well, autism isn't a disease, Ray. It's just another facet of the human condition, and not a well understood one, unfortunately."

"I never said it was a disease," Ray said defencively. "I said she _suffers_ from it." He sat down heavily at the nearest table and started to unwrap his sandwich.

"Ah, I see," Fraser acknowledged, sitting around the corner from him. "And you do raise an interesting question. Do autistic people suffer from the condition itself, or simply from the reactions of others?"

"Why don't you ask Sal Correia," Ray said, shifting from side to side in his chair.

"A childhood friend?"

"You might say that."

Fraser's face scrunched with curiosity. "What sort of behaviours did he show that pointed to it?"

"Well, see if you can work this one out. His bookbag was always full but never had one schoolbook in it. He was a math whiz Da Vinci would be proud of, but he couldn't string a sentence together if the United Nations passed a resolution on it. Couldn't get through a day without somebody stuffing him in his locker or shaking him down for his lunch money." Ray paused and stared at the tabletop as if it owed him a fortune. "He was another one of Frank Zuko's favourite punching bags."

He tore an enormous chunk off his sandwich to occupy both his mind and his mouth. Fraser was silent: suddenly he understood why Ray had been so out of sorts the previous afternoon. Every time something reminded him of Frank Zuko, trouble was imminent - and in the months since Irene's death, such reminders had just poured sulfuric acid on the wound.

Finally Ray looked up with his mouth still half full. "Well, whaddya say we do, Benny? Go visit on Hannah, or go back to sniffin' around for the superior balance and the high-pressure snowblowers?"

"Actually, I think I'd like to speak to the train crew. I'm interested in finding out what other activity was on the line at that hour."

* * *

 

The sun was on its way west over the plains by the time Fraser and Ray arrived at Bensenville Yard, the second largest and potentially busiest yard on Dearborn Rail System. It could be even busier, but several of its tracks lay empty - no surprise to Fraser once he saw the spaghetti-like rails and missing switch points rendering those tracks unserviceable. Five locomotives in various states of cleanliness and repair idled on three different tracks, outside of an elderly brick building at the yard's edge. Reading their numbers, Fraser soon identified the two engines that had been involved in the incident: Electro-Motive GP-9s, if he wasn't mistaken, still hard at work after forty years. They were still coupled together, and one of them had wide, ugly streaks of oil running down its sides from its exhaust stacks.

The building itself appeared to have seen far better days, with visible cracks in its windows and chunks of mortar missing from its front steps. Four men lounged around a picnic table and the concrete stairs to the main entrance. Two of them intently eyed Fraser and Ray as they pulled up in front of the building and got out of the car. Of those two, one man, silver-haired and lean-muscled, approached the duo, wearing a slight and unreadable smile.

"Good day, gentlemen," Fraser said pleasantly.

The silver-haired one walked right past them and stopped in his tracks, gawking at the Riviera, appraising it with a lustful eye. Presently he turned to Ray, gestured at the car, and commented: "Hell of a set of wheels you got there, brother."

"Yeah, if only you knew the half of it," Ray said wryly. He glanced over at Fraser, who was already introducing himself to the other three men.

"Wouldn't be interested in sellin' it, would ya?"

"Well, not unless you wanna let that Canadian over there talk you to death about brake lining," Ray smirked.

A quick shift of the man's eyes told Ray he wasn't interested. Side by side they walked back to the rest of the gathering, just in time to hear Fraser asking about the nearest interchange point with CP Rail.

"This is it, red man." This from a fair-skinned and thin-moustached young man in a heavy black Carhartt coat. "This is as far as the CP goes, unless they decide they wanna eat this outfit alive."

"The way these clowns have been running the place into the ground, it can't happen soon enough for me," another man commented.

"What makes you say that?" Fraser asked.

"There's been more mergers around here in the last twenty years than on Wall Street," silver-hair said. "Union Pacific bought out the Chicago and North Western last year. They decided to get rid of some of the old Rock Island trackage to the west and south, and the Dearborn guys got a hold of it. Ever since then, it's starting to look just like the old Rock Island Line did right before it went under."

Ray nodded, remembering the news from 1980 that the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad - after almost two decades of mismanagement and bankruptcy - had been put out of its misery by the courts. From the dismal condition of the tracks, the engines and the building, he could see what silver-hair meant. "So if it happens, are you guys liable to get spit out, or swallowed whole?" he asked.

"The second one, if CP knows what's good for 'em."

"And Mr. Robert Stanoski and Slade McCorrie, will they also be on the menu?" Fraser enquired.

Almost immediately the four men seemed on the verge of imploding, staring at the ground and at each other, none of them apparently willing to speak up. Ray knew the look - he'd seen it too many times amongst his own brothers in arms, whenever Internal Affairs came sniffing around.

"Umm, why those two?" moustache-man asked finally.

"They were involved in a collision last night, and we have reason to believe it was an attempted murder," Fraser said.

"Rob and Slade, are you kiddin'?" A balding, goateed character wearing desert combat boots stood up straight, stepping belligerently in Fraser's direction. "Ain't no way. Them two guys wouldn't run over a turtle if you paid 'em forty hours' overtime!"

"Perhaps not on purpose," Fraser clarified.

"So are either of 'em gonna be around later?" Ray asked.

"Not unless the investigation wraps up within the next couple of hours. They both got pulled out of service yesterday afternoon."

Nonplussed by this tidbit of news, Fraser and Ray followed the railroad men's directions up to the building's second floor. On the other side of a large office space that reminded Ray a little too much of his own squad room, they came to a door marked "DIVISION SUPERINTENDENT" with several large, patchy scratch marks etched into it. Curiosity aroused, Ray rapped loudly on the door. A raspy, unfriendly voice from within responded: "What?"

Ray entered first with Fraser close behind. "Amos Histler?" Fraser enquired.

"Yeah, who're you?" the man behind the battered metal desk demanded.

"Chicago P.D.," Ray answered, showing his shield.

Amos Histler was a short, heavyset character with a receding hair line and a moustache - not to mention an obvious personality trait - that made his derogatory nickname self-evident. Fraser had no doubt left that the numerous scores in the door of the office were a futile effort to hide swastika carvings. Histler's voice had the consistency of sandpaper: his sneering face gave them no illusions of welcome.

"Yeah, so what can I help you with?" he said, placing condescending emphasis on the 'you' and immediately looking back down at his desk work.

"We'd like to know where to contact Slade McCorrie and Robert Stanoski," Fraser said plainly.

"Then you're in the wrong place, Big Red. I sent those two lazy bums home this morning."

"Yeah, so we heard," Ray said. "Trauma leave, is it?"

"Trauma leave!" Histler snorted. "Hell, no. Every time I turn around, they're delayin' a job and makin' up some lame excuse like 'power problems' or 'hitch wouldn't make' or some other malarkey. Last night was one delay too many."

"What, you mean the woman they hit south of Cermak Road?" Ray's face furrowed.

"No, I mean the gas station they stopped at without permission right before that. Not that they would have gotten it anyway for an unnecessary delay like that!"

"They saved that woman's life by makin' that stop! You know that, don't you?"

"What I know is that every union scumbag draggin' his heels around out there is tryin' to screw me any which way he can," Histler spat. "They think they're better than anyone else, cream of the crop, nectar of the gods. You have any idea how much of my money they flush down the toilet stoppin' at every gas station and fast-food joint on the west side?"

"Mr. Histler, you can't possibly weigh any monetary loss against the preservation of a human life," Fraser said, incensed.

"And McCorrie - " Histler went on as if Fraser hadn't even spoken - "thinks he's somethin' special just 'cause he's some big-shot war hero. But he's one of the biggest scumbags ever ran an engine around here. Nobody likes workin' with the guy - only reason Stanoski's with him is 'cause he's got no seniority. I pay him eighteen bucks an hour, twelve hours a night, and he don't even have a wife or kids to blow it on. How selfish does that grab ya?"

Ray chortled. "So you're robbin' Peter to pay Paul, is that it?"

"Not like it makes a difference with these Marys," Histler said with a sarcastic grin. "Now if you gentlemen got nothing else to say, you might wanna let me get back to work."

"Somebody deliberately placed that young woman in the path of their train," Fraser said with quiet insistence. "That means it was a murder attempt. It's our duty to investigate - "

"Wrong!" Histler slapped one hand on his desktop and pushed himself to his feet. "Wrong on two counts. Count one - it ain't _their_ train, it's _my_ train. They've delayed it one too many times and given me a royal mess to clean up with unhappy customers and unhappier share holders. Count two - whatever happened out there happened on railroad property."

"I fail to see what difference that makes," Fraser said, fighting to maintain his composure.

"Two words - federal pre-emption. You got no jurisdiction here - and neither do _you,"_ Histler added, pointing harshly at Ray. "This investigation is _my_ responsibility, and I suggest you let me get back to it."

"Why don't you try obstruction of justice on for size," Ray snapped.

"Why don't you try runnin' that past the Surface Transportation Board," Histler retorted. "But don't come cryin' to me when they tell you to take a hike. In the meantime, bye-bye." He waved mockingly at the two men, lips curled back in a snarling grin.

Ray would have laid him out flat across the desk if he'd thought he could get away with it. Histler's officious arrogance made his veins clog with anger. But he knew that the Surface Transportation Board's say over everything that ran on parallel ribbons of steel was ultimate and absolute. He glanced at Fraser, scowled at Histler and grudgingly turned toward the door.

"You know, Mr. Histler," Fraser said pontifically, "even if the wheels of commerce should one day stop turning, the wheels of justice never will."

"We'll see about that," Histler sneered.

Walking back to the car, Ray shook his head in a depressed gesture. "Tell me you don't have jackasses like him in Canada."

"I wish I could, Ray, but Gerrard's co-conspirators on the East Bay Power Project continue to be revealed every month."

"Well, that settles it. We can't get a point of contact for those guys, we'll never find out what else happened out there."

"I don't feel we should give up so easily, Ray. You know how we found Hannah. You remember how fearful she was before she tried to run away. And those two young men were right alongside us. They'll never forget what happened last night. I don't believe we should, either."

Ray shrugged, able to see Fraser's point but missing how they could work around Histler and his close-minded ruthlessness. "I wonder what made her freak out like she did, though," he mused.

"I wouldn't care to venture a guess, but I should hope she...." Fraser paused and frowned at the sight of a small slip of paper tucked under the Riviera's left windscreen wiper. He pulled it free, unfolded it, and with a _harrumph_ he handed it to Ray. The slip read: _Rob Stanoski - 555-1756._

Fraser glanced around, trying to catch a glimpse of someone watching them, possibly the someone who had placed the piece of paper. No one was visible, but he had little doubt it was one of the men they'd spoken to outside the yard office.

"Well, who do you wanna see first, him or Hannah?" Ray asked.

"For the sake of time, perhaps we should divide our resources," Fraser offered. "If Hannah's drawing has been blown away, whoever tried to kill her probably knows that she survived and may try to come after her again."

"Well, it's probably better you talk to her. I don't know how I'm gonna hold up. I'll try and meet up with this Rob guy someplace and then catch up with you at the hospital."

"Sounds like a plan," Fraser smiled.

* * *

 

Returning to Hannah's nook in the ICU, Fraser found her sitting upright and cross-legged, and her mother sitting at the foot of her bed. Disconnected from all monitors, she was much more warmly dressed in a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans her mother had brought along. Dr. Manheim had deemed a cast unnecessary: instead, Hannah's left arm was braced and in a sling. She held her pad of paper in her left hand, whilst with her right she sketched something well outside Fraser's line of vision.

Fraser poked his head through the curtain with raised eyebrows and a warm smile. "Hello, Hannah," he greeted her in all friendliness.

She looked up and smiled in reply. "Constable Fraser," she greeted him. "Mom, this is Mr. Pelt." Fraser couldn't help rolling his eyes upward at his thick shock of black hair.

"Yes, I know," Mrs. Emerson said, joining in the smiles. "We've met."

"Where's Mr. Nose?" Hannah asked.

Suddenly relieved that Ray hadn't come along, Fraser scratched his eyebrow. "Oh, you mean, ah, Detective Vecchio? He's out questioning possible witnesses. I wanted to come and see how you're faring."

"I'm alive," Hannah said. "And I feel better. Dr. Ravenhead says she'll let me go home soon."

"Good, good." Fraser had to smile with some amusement at Hannah's way of assigning a nickname to a person based on a physical feature - annoying though it might be to some people.

"I love your coat. Like red sky at night, sailor's delight."

"Oh, thank you kindly. Although, it's red serge, actually. As in, red serge in the morning, perpetrators take warning."

"What a rhyme!" Hannah gushed. "I love it. Don't you, Mom?"

"Yes, dear, it's lovely," Mrs. Emerson said with a broad smile. "And how goes the investigation, Constable?"

"Very much active," Fraser said. "I was wondering, Hannah, if you remember anything that happened to you that night."

Suddenly Hannah swallowed and bowed her head, focusing intently on her sketch pad. With a look of unconditional understanding and love, Mrs. Emerson reached over to touch her forearm. "Hannah, Constable Fraser just wants to find whoever hurt you to make sure they don't get away with it."

"I know, Mom," Hannah muttered. "I'm autistic, not stupid."

"I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry." Mrs. Emerson turned to Fraser, her face pleading. "Please, just give her a little time."

"Of course," Fraser conceded. He waited patiently as Hannah's pencil made quick, rapid strokes in every conceivable direction across the pad. She breathed deeply, she licked the corner of her mouth, and with each stroke of the pencil her round face became more and more spirited and inspired, almost passionate.

The scraping sound of the curtain sliding aside bristled the hairs on the back of Fraser's neck. Instinctively he spun around, ready to KO whoever was entering. He relaxed, albeit not completely, at the sight of Slade McCorrie on the other side, his expression apprehensive. Fraser stepped to one side and kept a watchful eye on the younger man as he tentatively stepped in.

"Mr. McCorrie," he greeted him.

"Sorry to interrupt. I saw you come in here, so...."

"You wanted to see Hannah?" Fraser surmised.

"Yeah. Hannah? My name's Slade." He forced a split-second smile at her, but Fraser could see in his eyes how tired and worried he really was.

"You know my daughter?" Mrs. Emerson said, stiffening on guard.

"Um....yeah, unfortunately, yes." Slade pulled in a deep breath. "I was running the train that hit her the other night. I, um....I just wanted to see if she - she was okay."

Hannah looked right at him, her pencil stilled, and with a frightened face she started to draw herself up into the fetal position. Meanwhile Mrs. Emerson stood up, assuming a protective stance and a disbelieving face. "You wanted - well, isn't that nerve! You almost killed her and now you want to know if she's okay?!"

"Look, it was an accident!"

"That's not what Constable Fraser here thinks!"

"Ma'am, quite to the contrary," Fraser cut in, holding up one hand to stay her. "Whoever wanted Hannah dead tried to use Mr. McCorrie to attend to it. Now in his defence, he saw her in time and had the presence of mind to make an emergency stop as soon as he recognised the danger. If not for that, Hannah might not have survived."

At once Mrs. Emerson looked away. Presently she shot another serrated look at Slade and then turned away, moving over to stand beside her daughter. Saying nothing, Hannah hunched over, pencil scratching so hard as to attract everyone's attention. She took a brief glance up, her eyes touching Slade for a split second, then returning to her sketch.

"For whatever it's worth...." Slade said, gulping. "I tried to stop as quick as I could. But even at fifteen miles an hour, a short, fat train like that don't stop on a dime."

 _"Doesn't_ stop," Hannah corrected him, her tone intense.

"You were at that speed when you first saw the can?" Fraser guessed. At Slade's nod, he went on: "Do you remember how fast you were going at the point of impact?"

Slade sighed. "No, not exactly. Maybe four, maybe five. But if we'd been going much faster...." He glanced at Hannah empathetically. "Thanks be to God you're alive."

Hannah looked up at him again, not making eye contact but smiling inexplicably. "You just rhymed, you know."

"I did what now?"

"You rhymed. 'No, not exactly, maybe four, maybe five, but if we'd been going much faster, thanks be to God you're alive.' So clever you didn't even know it, did you?"

Slade couldn't suppress a chuckle - or an admiring look at Hannah and her smile as she returned to her sketching.

"Hannah loves poetry," Mrs. Emerson supplied. "Ogden Nash, especially. Doesn't matter how long the sentence is, as long as it rhymes."

"Poetry in motion," Fraser muttered thoughtfully.

"What's that?" Slade asked.

"Oh, nothing. Just a moment of deja vu." Fraser waved a dismissive hand. "Hannah, are you...." His voice trailed off as Hannah looked up again, and lowered her pad, holding out her sketch for all to see.

Mrs. Emerson smiled and rubbed her shoulder without a word. For years it had been her accustomed silent show of approval for Hannah's talent. Fraser and Slade moved closer, the former narrowing his eyes and the latter holding his breath. Hannah had drawn another building: this one somewhat more mundane than the one she'd drawn in the snow, not quite two stories high, worn and weathered and seemingly neglected. Fraser drank in the cracks, scores, dirt patches, and sharp details with an appreciative eye and wished that the drawing was in colour so that he could more easily interpret what Hannah was trying to say. But Slade, the closer he moved, the harder and closer he peered.

"That's good," Fraser said. "That's very good."

"You know, that looks really familiar," Slade mused aloud. "Looks _damned_ familiar from here. But for my mother's life I can _not_ think where I've seen it before."

"I've had to do it over three times," Hannah said.

Alert, Fraser enquired: "Why is that?"

"Painted it once. Then I went out to have coffee with Mom, told her all about it. But I got home and it disappeared. Like I never even painted it, like I dreamed it instead. So I had to sit down and paint it all over again to be sure."

Fraser squinted at the memory of the signs of force used on Hannah's door, and the knocked-over easel her mother had noticed in her apartment. It must have borne the painting in question, probably both iterations of it. "Where did you paint it originally?" he asked.

"At home," Hannah said simply.

"No, I mean...." Fraser took a breath. "Is this something from the real world you've translated onto paper?"

"Yeah," Hannah nodded.

"Is it the one you're doing for the travel agency?" her mother asked.

"Mmm-hmm. They make people want to come from all over to see Chicago, so I make Chicago look presentable. Show its best face. I want to show it to everyone. But, it's orange time now and it'll be blue time soon, and we won't be able to see anything. Have to wait for yellow or white time."

Slade stared quizzically at Fraser, but Fraser said nothing - he knew Hannah meant the time of day, based on light levels. He eyed her again and smiled. "I understand. Perhaps meal time will be helpful."

"Perhaps," Hannah agreed. She glanced obliquely at Slade, who had moved over to her left, peering harder yet at her drawing as he tried to place where he'd seen the subject before.

"I gotta say, though, this is amazing," he remarked. "I bet if I stare at it long enough, I'll recognise it. This is - this is incredibly good."

"I, um....I....thank you." Hannah nodded spastically, still avoiding eye contact. She clearly didn't know how to accept such praise from a man who could have killed her, even by accident, but Fraser wore an ever so slight smile of his own as he noticed starkly contrasting personalities before him. Amos Histler would have him believe that Slade McCorrie was an ungrateful, underdealing, bottom-feeding piece of fecal matter with a selfish streak as wide as Lake Michigan. Now that he had seen Slade up close in normal light, however, he had had a chance to read the young engineer's eyes. They'd been full of genuine worry when he first poked his head in: now they were full of curious interest in Hannah and her work. Ungrateful, underdealing, bottom-feeding pieces of fecal matter with a selfish streak as wide as Lake Michigan did not show such raw concern for another human being, let alone one who had just escaped an unpleasant death. Silently, Fraser resolved to speak to Slade at greater length and determine once and for all whether he could trust him.

* * *

 

"Okay, so let me get this straight." Ray waved his pen at Rob Stanoski as he followed him across the body bay of a restoration shop in La Grange. "You take a coffee break, you get back moving, you're moving slow enough so you avoid killing someone, and Histler suspends you for it?"

"I know, it makes about as much sense as a three-dollar bill, but that's the railroad for you," Stanoski said, heaving a helpless shrug with his free hand. With his loaded hand he laid a slice of red-burnished sheet metal against the frame of a 1964 Ford Falcon resting on a lift. "Guys like Histler and the rest of those asshats on the top floor, you'd swear they live in some kind of fantasy land where every move only takes five minutes, brake tests are just a formality, and they can always put it on the train crew whenever something goes wrong. Only reason I decided to stick with it is 'cause I've got a wife and a kid to look after. The pay is good and the retirement plan is even better."

"Yeah, I bet Histler knows that or he wouldn't have suspended you for taking one coffee break too many."

"Wasn't just for delaying the job, according to him. The second hare-brained reason he shot us was a restricted speed violation."

"A what now?" Ray shot him a puzzled look.

"If we stop anywhere we can't see a signal light," Stanoski elaborated, "we gotta run at restricted speed till we can see the next one, which means we gotta be able to stop within half the distance of hitting something. But the last signal we did see was a clear. If we hadn't stopped, we could just as easily have been going thirty or forty miles an hour and there's no way we could have avoided killing that girl. Hell, we might have killed her anyway if Slade wasn't on the throttle."

Ray frowned thoughtfully, first remembering Histler's scathing denunciation, but also how Slade had apologised for getting in his way in the convenience store. "Yeah, what's he like to work with?"

"I don't have a problem with him." Stanoski shrugged, moved to a workbench behind the Falcon and procured a plastic cup full of bolts and washers. "He's a damn good engineer. A lot of guys think he's a hard case 'cause he's so uptight. But he's uptight 'cause he has PTSD, and he has PTSD 'cause of something that happened to him in Kuwait during the Gulf War. But he never talks about it, and I don't bug him. I just mind my own business, I get my work done, I let Slade do his job, and he and I get along just fine."

"So how'd he take it when Histler kicked him out?"

"Not too good. But better than he did when Histler laid into us for all the _other_ delays we supposedly caused."

"What other delays?" Ray immediately hefted his notebook.

Stanoski chortled as he bent over and started inserting bolts into holes on the car's frame. "Well, there's a turn job starts out from Bensenville in the afternoon, goes down to Champaign and comes back early in the morning. But for God knows what reason, they never passed us going north. Then this morning, Histler calls us on the carpet, tells us they outlawed south of Kankakee and says it's 'cause our collision shut down the whole main line. And _then_ when he gives us the third degree 'cause we never got our propane cars delivered, all because we took an unauthorised break and then failed to observe restricted speed....man, when he spit that out, I thought Slade was gonna go Mike Tyson on his ass."

"Yeah, I bet," Ray said. "So I'm getting the gist of it that Slade and Histler aren't too fond of each other."

"Not to put too fine a point on it, no. I mean, Histler's a piece of work to begin with, but he's got it out for Slade big-time. Goes back to a couple of years ago when Slade pounded the piss out of some know-it-all conductor who was kissin' Histler's ass like it was a Blarney stone. Histler couldn't prove it, so Slade dodged one hell of a bullet on that one. But I bet that's got a lot more to do with us gettin' suspended than hittin' that girl."

"You got any idea where Slade is?"

"He said he might head over to the hospital to see how the girl's doing. What happened last night rattled him somethin' awful."

Ray was about to pose another question about how Slade had thought to act as quickly as he did, but his cell phone trilled from deep within his coat, drawing his annoyance as much as his attention. Rolling his eyes, he dug it out and got a hold of the mouthpiece on the fourth ring. "Frannie, this better not be you," he snapped. Almost at once his petulance vanished. "Oh, hey, Benny. How's Hannah? Oh, she is? Good. Nah, the way Rob's telling it, there was nothing else going on out there. Hold on." He held the phone away from his face for a moment. "You sure you didn't see anything else before you stopped?"

"Nope," Stanoski replied. "Not even a pump car."

"Yeah, Benny, he's sure," Ray relayed. "Where are you? Still there? Okay, gimme a half hour. See ya." Nodding to himself, Ray dropped his phone into one coat pocket and reached into another one for a business card. "All right, look. Anything else comes up, or you think of something you missed before, call me."

"Yeah, you bet." Stanoski nodded and slid the card into his hip pocket as Ray turned and ambled out of the shop.

* * *

 

"A woman is like a tea bag," Hannah said, dangling one in front of her in the hospital cafeteria. "You never know how strong she is until you drop her in hot water."

"I can certainly see the truth in that," Fraser smiled.

"Mom says it all the time."

"She'd know, wouldn't she?" Slade offered from behind Fraser. Catching the look from Hannah, he added offhandedly: "I - I mean, she raised you pretty much single handed, right? And now here you are making a living doing what you really love...."

"But it's not supposed to kill me," Hannah muttered under her breath. "Kill me softly, kill me tender, kill me dead for service rendered? Now it wants to kill me and I don't know why."

"Well, I didn't mean that."

"I can certainly see the truth in it," Hannah echoed Fraser.

"So do you remember what happened the second time you painted the city scape?" Fraser asked.

"Only a little. I...." Hannah stopped mid-syllable as she poured hot water from an urn over the tea bag in a styrofoam cup. Her eyes narrowed, and her head tilted upward. "Tea."

"Tea?"

"I put the city up to dry and then went to make tea. You know, they say a watched teakettle never boils, but it always does if you give it enough time to get warmed up. Boil, bubble, toil and trouble...." She looked at Fraser with a clarity in her gaze he hadn't yet seen from her. "I saw the demon in my teakettle."

"Wait - so - the demon was _in_ your teakettle?" Slade said, hoping in earnest that she would clarify that for him.

 _"Were_ in my teakettle," Hannah said, shooting an oblique and short-lived glance at him. "I could see them behind me."

"A reflection," Fraser supplied. "Her teakettle is made of stainless steel, if I remember correctly. Whoever assailed her would have been visible on its side."

"Ah," Slade said. "Well, you know, I may not be the brightest headlight on the road, but I'm pretty sure 'demon' is a singular noun."

"Well, you're wrong." Hannah stood her ground, but she still barely looked at him.

Slade bristled. Hannah had a face of ethereal beauty and he wouldn't dare refute it, but right now it was full of condescension that was entirely concentrated on him. Turning away, he sidled behind Fraser and left the chow line. "I'm gonna go grab us a table," he mumbled.

Hannah sighed and moved on toward the cafeteria's buffet. "So much I have to show him, but how can he see it when he obviously doesn't understand?" she said to Fraser. "How come no one understands?"

"Well, you know, Hannah, you're very visually oriented," Fraser said. "Not everyone sees the world the same way you do. Which, I suspect, is why God gifted you with the ability to show other people the world through your artwork." He paused to lift two plates of chicken tenders and a bowl of spaghetti from the buffet in front of him. "So, you saw the demon reflected in your teakettle."

Hannah nodded and gulped. "And there was a smell. A sweet smell. Smelled like my hands at yellow time."

At once Fraser's mind kicked into high gear. What would a woman like Hannah put on her hands in the morning? For the work she did, she needed her hands to be flexible and free of irritation. Hand lotion of some kind. An inordinary smell reminiscent of hand lotion....

 _Chloroform._ Inwardly, Fraser bit his lip. Even if she'd seen a face, it might not have been imprinted in her memory. But one thing lingering in his own memory was the empty easel that her mother had found lying on its back.

"You said you put the city up to dry before you went to make tea," he reminded her.

"The city, take two."

"And you don't know what happened to your first attempt."

Hannah shook her head and pursed her lips. "What did they want with me?" she asked in earnest. "Everyone wants something from me, work, time, image, good grades in algebra - what did I have that the demon could possibly want to take?"

"Perhaps there's something in the cityscape that they didn't want revealed." Fraser's voice was muted. He could see Hannah's distress as plain as daylight. The poor girl really had no idea why this had happened - she was an artist, an autistic and introverted artist, who wanted to carry on her work in solitary peace until someone or something came out of the blue and tried to kill her for a cause beyond understanding.

In any case, the demon had wanted no resistance from Hannah, but hadn't raped her either. They must want her dead for some other unfathomable reason: Fraser's suspicion grew that the cityscape painting had something to do with it. And fussy as she was about grammar, why did she insist on referring to the demon in the plural? The only conjecture Fraser could draw was that she'd seen at least two men reflected in the kettle, perhaps standing one behind the other, looking from her point of view like two heads protruding from the same body.

"Do you have any memory of what they looked like?" he asked.

Hannah bowed her head, then lifted it again, then pulled at her tea and fidgeted, looking all around her. She appeared terribly nervous: it reminded Fraser of her frantic quick glances around the dark railroad tracks after she'd been hit. She breathed sharply in and out, and she looked toward every conceivable degree on the spherical compass. Suddenly it hit Fraser - she was looking for a piece of paper and a pencil so she could show him the answer.

"Come on," he said. "Let's sit down and you can show me."

He walked alongside Hannah to the table Slade had claimed, where she slid into the seat across from Slade and immediately grabbed two paper napkins from the dispenser. She turned to a fruitless search of the tabletop, seeming almost in a panic. The sill of the window beside the table had nothing to offer her either, spurring Fraser to reach into his collar and pull out a pen. "Do you need this?"

"No," Hannah muttered tersely. "I can't make a mistake with that. Can't fix it. If I make a mistake, I have to fix it. I need a pencil."

"Here." Slade pulled an 0.7-millimetre mechanical pencil from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. With nary a word of thanks or even acknowledgement, Hannah bent over the table and went to work.

Fraser looked up to see Ray loping across the cafeteria toward them at a leisurely gait. He waved briefly and angled himself toward the seat across from Fraser. "Go, team," he greeted them. "How you feeling, Hannah?"

"Ray...." Fraser held up a hand to silence him as Hannah twisted away and hunched over her drawing. "Let her be. She needs to concentrate."

Taken aback, Ray fell silent for a moment and stared at Hannah, every memory he had of Sal Correia suddenly washing through his mind like a tsunami. Finding reserves of patience he'd never tapped before, he nodded and turned away. "All right, I'm gonna go grab a bite. I'll be right back."

Fraser and Slade remained to watch the drawing take shape. Hannah's face twisted with frustration as she tried to hold the napkin still and taut with her left hand, but the damage to the soft tissues of her upper arm complicated things - until Slade reached over to hold the napkin's far edge for her. She stared at his hand for a long second until she regained her focus and then resumed sketching. Slade stared at her sympathetically while Fraser eyed both of them, his face impassive. Hannah remained intensely focused on her work, but Slade had run the full gamut from worried to curious to apologetic to sympathetic every hour that he'd been near her. Whatever his experience on the shores of the Persian Gulf in years gone by, he seemed desperate to atone for it somehow.

At length, Ray returned with a tray of pasta and garlic bread that he regarded as more of a necessary evil than a square meal. "I swear Ma would have a stroke just at the sight of this stuff," he commented. He joined the other two men in staring at Hannah's drawing: she had calmed down considerably now that she had had a chance to withdraw from the real world into her own. She added the last few shades and pushed the drawing to the middle of the table. A hyper-detailed sketch of an elliptical teakettle, with two warped, misshapen human forms reflected in it, now adorned the napkin.

"So the demon are two," Fraser observed. "Caucasian with short hair, dark clothes, on the tall side judging by the distortion of the image...."

"Well, that narrows it down to just about sixty-four percent of nine million people in the Chicago metropolitan area," Ray said wryly. "How about a face?"

"They were behind me," Hannah said. "This is the last thing I remember before....before...." She shuddered and curled up into herself, gulping. Slade levelled a piteous look at her before he turned and looked out the window, wondering how to tell her that he knew what she was going through.

"It would appear they chloroformed her, which likely resulted in a memory gap," Fraser added. "I'm afraid the motive remains unknown, although I believe her painting of the cityscape threatened to reveal something they didn't want anyone to see."

Ray tossed up his hands. "Oh, great, so it's only taken us a half hour to get from no to where. I don't know about you guys, but I sure don't feel like tracking the nearest herd of reindeer halfway across the Klondike on an empty stomach. You gonna eat, or what?"

"We should say grace," Hannah asserted.

"Come again?"

"I believe she means a blessing, Ray," Fraser offered.

"I know what it means, Fraser."

"We always say grace," Hannah went on. "Got a lot of thanks to give, for eating, for working....especially for living. We shouldn't make exceptions."

"I'd say we're both acutely aware that your mother wouldn't have it any other way," Fraser put in. He shot Ray a penetrating stare: Hannah looked from one man to the other, waiting expectantly.

"Oh, all right, fine," Ray grumbled, heaving an exasperated sigh and wishing Fraser hadn't thought to invoke his mother and her stratospheric standards of thanksgiving. With head bowed and hands clasped, he intoned: "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yay God. There, ya happy now?"

"Quite so," Fraser smiled. He unfolded his napkin and glanced at Hannah, who was also smiling, though more from amusement than satisfaction.

"That rhymes nicely," she said. "I love it when people rhyme. Makes the world sound so much more like it's in harmony with itself. So rare that it ever is."

"Yes, I quite agree," Fraser said, eyeing her. "It's nice to see you smiling, Hannah. Wouldn't you say so, Slade?"

Slade chuckled and offered a half-smile of his own, with a shrug on the side. "Yeah, well, it's....it's nice to see someone around here still knows how."

"Okay, so let's talk about what else was goin' on out there last night," Ray said around a mouthful of ziti. "You and Rob work the same job at the same time every day?"

"Yep. BJ-Three at eighteen hundred. Get on our power, get the power on our train, leave the yard by nineteen hundred, and go switch customers in Joliet and Kankakee."

"You have any other trains go by you when you're out there?"

"A couple. Usually a transfer job from Gary and a turn job coming back up from Champaign. But we didn't see or hear from any of 'em. To hear Histler tell it, that little mess we had shut down the entire main line, both tracks in both directions."

"Even the northbound one?"

"Even the northbound one."

"Was there anything else out of the ordinary last night?" Fraser asked.

"Nothing really remarkable. Except...." Slade's eyes narrowed and he stared off to the opposite window. Fraser, reading the faraway look in his eyes, could tell that he'd just remembered a critical detail.

"We don't usually stop at that gas station," Slade went on, his voice slightly hoarse. "We wait till we're done our Joliet work and then go to a twenty-four-hour Starbucks downtown. But you know what? I barely got any sleep that day, we left the yard late, and I knew I'd need some serious caffeine to keep me going. So I asked Rob if we could stop for coffee early and he was all for it. Oh, my God....I knew it was something safety-critical, but...."

"But you saved my life," Hannah finished. "If you'd been going track speed, I'd be toast."

Fraser raised an eyebrow as Slade nodded his head, both remembering what Stanoski had said, word-for-word, just after the collision. But Fraser noticed something Slade had not: Hannah was looking him directly in the eye. Rarity that it was for an autistic person - even a high-functioning autistic like her - Fraser wondered if she had recognised Slade's quick thinking and if some change had come over her.

Ray shot a look toward the entrance to the cafeteria, only to spot exactly what he'd dreaded in the flurry of hot pink, bright blue and violet accosting their table. Fraser barely restrained himself from uttering "oh, dear" out loud at the sight of Francesca Vecchio flouncing across the cafeteria towards them, a thick brown envelope tucked under her arm.

"Well, obviously someone has to give your lieutenant a little talking-to about investment returns," she announced, dropping the envelope on the table in front of Ray. Before he could answer, she rattled on: "Oh, why, Frase! How fancy running into you here!"

"Yeah, we aren't partners or anythin'," Ray mumbled.

"Er....good evening, Francesca." Fraser could think of little else to say as she leaned imposingly over him, sticking her hip out to one side.

"Who do we have here?" Francesca asked, glancing at Hannah. "New friend?"

Ray could smell the jealousy oozing from his little sister's pores, but before he had a chance to chew and swallow, Fraser jumped in ahead of him. "As a matter of fact, yes. Miss Emerson is involved in an investigation of ours. Ah, Hannah, may I introduce Miss Francesca Vecchio."

"Hi," Francesca said with nary an offer of a handshake.

"Hi." Hannah barely looked at her, not sure what to make of this flashy, outgoing woman overhanging her and her new friends.

In one quick move Francesca grabbed a chair from a neighbouring table and sat at the outer side between Fraser and Ray. "Okay, so I've been to like six different strip malls from Lake Forest to Blue Island now," she groused. "And they all keep asking me the same thing - how am I gonna freshen up the designer footwear market in Chicago to attract new clientele? And I keep asking them, how the hell do you expect me to pull that off? I mean, really, what woman in her right mind wants to be caught dead in hooker boots going into an IHOP?"

"Hey, if it's that much trouble, why don't you branch out into coach bags?" Ray said. Off Francesca's glare, he added mockingly: "A business woman's gotta diversify, don't you know that?"

"Yeah, into something worthwhile," Francesca sniped. "Like, something that's not gonna get bought out and razed less than a year from now to build some stupid sports complex."

"Oh, like the one that replaced the Rosemont Plaza, just outside of O'Hare?" Slade spoke up.

"Yeah. What gave you that idea?"

"Lango Enterprises, that's what. The construction firm that built that complex. The neighbours raised hell and damnation over them demolishing Rosemont Plaza, but it was either that or they'd tear up Noble Park and pave it over, pond and all."

"Hmm, well. Sounds to me like someone's horning in on someone else's territory. They might wanna think it over a little." Francesca shot a barbed stare across the table, but Hannah said nothing, didn't even attempt to make eye contact. Instead she bent over, intently twisted several strands of spaghetti around her fork and then gulped them down.

Francesca leaned toward Ray and dropped her voice a tone. "What's with her?"

"I'll explain later," Ray replied. "But we ain't got all night, Frannie. C'mon, just feed your face already."

"Well, did we say grace yet?"

* * *

 

At the door to a small bedroom near the ICU, Fraser poked his head through the doorway as Hannah retreated to the bed. "Good night, Hannah," he called after her.

"Good night," Hannah replied.

Fraser nodded to Slade, who stood in the doorway. "Good night, Slade."

"Good night. See you guys bright and early tomorrow, probably?"

"If there's the need." Fraser ambled past him and continued down the corridor to rejoin Ray and Francesca.

Meanwhile, Slade looked around the small room, dimly lit by its own lights and by the courtyard lights filtering in through the open window blinds. "Got upgraded to your own own luxury suite, huh?" he observed with a wry smile.

"Sort of," Hannah said. "But it's not home. I was supposed to go home tomorrow morning. But Dr. Ravenhead keeps saying she wants me to stay one more night to see how I feel."

"I bet you miss home by now - "

"I feel just fine, and I've gotta get home soon." Hannah's shoulders twitched, her feet scraped across the floor and she tried to look at him, but couldn't tear her mind away from her own home. "My tea's getting cold. Soon the smell will fade and I won't be able to remember anymore."

"You mean, er...." Slade stared at the floor, trying to work out what Hannah meant, but God only knew what incomprehensible muttering would alight from her lips next, should he decide to press the question.

"I want to show you so much, but I can't show you unless I'm home."

"Maybe there's something the cops can do," Slade said offhandedly.

Wincing from the ache in her arm, Hannah climbed into bed and glanced out the window. "I've got to go home soon, while I can still show you what you know....and I'm afraid the demon will find me here if I stay much longer."

Had she but known how right she was, Hannah would have bolted from the hospital and run as far away as she could before collapsing from exhaustion - had she but known about the pair of binoculars being aimed through the open blinds of her room from a records room across the courtyard.

"Yeah, she's alive, all right. Alive and well, and she's only getting weller. Looks like she's got a couple of new friends, too. You know, I thought you had that whole thing planned out to death, but I guess the question is, _whose_ death.

"Ah. Well, that's unfortunate. Because now, you understand, you have to get rid of all three of them quietly enough to avoid drawing attention to yourself, or me.

"Oh, you do, do you? Well, you're wrong about that, my friend. Well, that's not my job, nor is it my problem. It's for me to order and for you to carry out, same as it's been ever since we started this thing out together. So you might want to get down to business before business gets down to you. And don't bug me again until the deed is done, do you hear me?"


	4. Chapter 4

Fraser glanced at the page-a-day calendar on his desk for a time beyond count. It was a wasted gesture. He already knew all the relevant dates by heart: a month and six days before the Musical Ride was due to arrive in Chicago; four days since Hannah had been hit; three days since the two trainmen had been suspended; and one since Hannah had worked up the courage to recall any details of that night. He would have to make another check on her progress once his work for the day was done. He had arranged the border procedures with U.S. Customs, now all he had to do was to work out a seamless traverse across CP Rail's trackage to Chicago.

Fraser became conscious of a presence in his office doorway and glanced up, at the ready with an eloquent update on his progress to be delivered to the inspector. Instead he cocked one eyebrow with surprise to see Slade in the doorway, standing somewhat imbalanced on his right foot, his fist poised to knock. From his dark-circled eyes and his slack jaw, he looked terribly sleep-deprived.

"Oh, good morning," Fraser said.

"Hi," Slade replied. "Sorry to bother you. I, um, just wasn't sure whether I'd find you over here."

"Oh, no, not at all," Fraser said, rising. "What's on your mind?"

"Well, last night, after you guys left....Hannah told me she's getting desperate to go home so she can show me something. Said she wanted to 'show me what I know,' whatever the hell that means. And if the bad guy knows where she lives, what's to stop him from coming after her again?"

"True," Fraser mused. "There's a considerable risk in any case. However, given her visual orientation and her way of communicating through artwork, it may simply be that home is the best place for her to clear her memory so she can re-create her work and see if it gives us a clue."

"I don't know, is there anything you guys can do, like keep an eye on her or something?"

"I'm afraid I'm not quite certain at this juncture." Seeing the glistening of Slade's eye, Fraser cocked his head inquisitively to one side. "You're very concerned for her, aren't you?"

"Well, I - I've never hit anyone before. I mean, it's giving me nightmares already, and until I know she's gonna be okay...."

"If you don't mind me asking, what incurred your reaction to, ah, 'plug the brakes'?"

"It was, um...." Slade closed his eyes for a moment. "It was in Kuwait, back during the war. What looked like an abandoned garbage dumpster on the road turned out to be a booby trap. My truck was past it already when it went off. But God, if you saw what the rest of my platoon looked like afterward...." He squeezed his eyes shut and caught his breath, gulping.

"I see," Fraser said quietly. He was sorry he'd asked, but at least now he knew why Slade suffered from PTSD - which he wasn't faking - and why he'd had such a life-saving knee-jerk reaction. Fraser lowered his eyes for a moment and then raised them again, meeting Slade's. "You and Hannah were both very lucky, then."

"Well, considering what we both gotta live with for the next sixty-odd years...."

"Now did Rob see the can at the same time? Or did he see it after you did?"

"He didn't see anything till after I dumped the air. He was checking over his paperwork. That's one of his better points, he's in the National Guard and so he's always ready to deal with things well in advance. Wasn't he the one who figured out how to get Hannah out of that rig after you showed up?"

"Yes, indeed he was. But I still find it incredible that Mr. Histler suspended both of you over such a triviality after you effectively saved Hannah's life."

Slade shook his head dejectedly. "North American railroads are all the same. The guys upstairs treat us like we're single-celled organisms. It's been like that for a hundred and fifty years, and it ain't about to change. And DRS is even nastier than most - whenever Rob has to take a weekend for Guard training, Histler tries to dock him for violating the attendance policy. Hell, we could have been hauling a trainload of nuclear waste and avoided a head-on collision with a runaway gas train, and Histler would have taken me out of service for poor train handling and excessive speed."

Hearing Diefenbaker growl, Fraser glanced past Slade to feel a quickening of his pulse as he beheld Inspector Thatcher standing in the doorway, her arms folded. "Am I interrupting something, Constable?" she enquired, eyes narrow.

"Er, no, sir," Fraser said, coming to attention. "Mr. McCorrie and I were just discussing....runaway trains." He held his breath. It wasn't entirely untrue, but it was all that came to him on the spur of the moment.

"I see," Thatcher said with a forced smile. "Pray tell, Mr. McCorrie, where do you hail from?"

"Zanesville, Ohio, originally. But after the war, I needed a halfway decent job, so I just resettled here."

"Ohio, you say?"

"That's right."

"So, you're not Canadian."

"Well, not that I know of. I'm Scots-Irish, mostly - "

"Fraser," Thatcher interrupted, "would you be good enough to show Mr. McCorrie to the door and resume your assigned duties involving Canadian citizens?"

"Yes, sir," Fraser acquiesced. "I'm terribly sorry, Slade. I, ah - "

"No, no, that's okay," Slade said, waving a hand. "You do what you gotta do. I'll show myself out." As he lumbered past Thatcher, he mumbled under his breath: "I know when I ain't wanted."

Thatcher stared at him as if her eyes might shoot icicles into his jugulars if he wasn't careful. Then she turned to Fraser, taking on an expression well worthy of the 'Dragon Lady' appellation Ray often assigned to her. "In the future, Fraser, I strongly suggest you pay more attention to your loyalties," she said acidly. "I would certainly hate to lose yours."

"I shouldn't like to let them waver, sir," Fraser promised.

"I'm confident you don't." And with that, Thatcher turned around and vanished from the doorway as quickly as she'd appeared.

Fraser closed his eyes, timing in his mind her return to her desk. Then he launched himself out the door and hastened over to the stairs, just in time to catch Slade almost at the bottom landing. "Slade," he called after him. "I believe Hannah wants you to see what she has seen in case you recognise it. Perhaps it's the reason someone wants her dead. And as there's a good chance her life is still at risk, I'd appreciate it if you could stay in touch."

"So where am I gonna find her, then?" Slade shrugged.

"Eighteen fifty-six South River Road in Des Plaines. Detective Vecchio and I will be there with her by tomorrow morning."

"You're on." With affirmative finger pointed, Slade proceeded down the stairs and departed the consulate. Suddenly he felt better than he had in days: a great deal more inspired and excited than he had since that fateful night in Westchester.

Fraser, meanwhile, stood at the railing on the second floor, eyes narrow and dim and unseeing, trying to spot a clue he might have missed before. Only Thatcher's voice blared from her office to break his reverie.

_"Fraser....!"_

"Oh, dear," Fraser muttered under his breath, hastening back to his own office.

* * *

 

"You sure this isn't gonna hurt?" Ray enquired, strolling alongside Fraser down the hospital corridors toward the ICU.

"I shouldn't think so, no. But every day Hannah stays here, she risks not only forgetting the details of her cityscape painting, but being found by her assailants. If we don't smuggle her back home, she stands to hurt worse than she already has."

"Yeah, well, her neck isn't the only one at risk right now." Ray glanced furtively around as Fraser led him into a linen closet and closed the door. The closet was pitch-dark: even the bottom of the door had a rubber skirt to aid sterilisation, but had the side effect of blocking the light from the corridor. Ray fought off the urge to grope ahead of him for fear of punching Fraser in the kidney.

"All right, now," Fraser's voice punctured through the blackness. "I believe I can disguise myself in scrubs if the right size should present itself...."

"Fraser, that's my coattail."

"Oh. My apologies, Ray. Perhaps the next shelf up - oh, dear. That's your, um...."

"All right, that's it. Where the hell are the lights?" Ray groped blindly behind him until he found the light switch beside the door. He turned on the light and gave Fraser a dirty look, which Fraser pointedly ignored as he pulled a set of pale blue scrubs from a shelf to one side.

"This should do nicely," he said. From another shelf he drew a headdress, and then another set of scrubs that he proffered Ray's way.

"Oh-ho, no, Fraser!" Ray protested, holding up his hands. "You are _not_ getting my cold, dead body all gussied up in scrubs! The straitjackets were bad enough, but scrubs? Forget it!"

"Well, Ray, if we're going to make this work, you need a disguise," Fraser insisted. "Perhaps...." He turned around and pulled a clean white coat from a rack on the other side of the closet. "Here."

"Now that's more like it. What the hell is all this for, anyway?"

"A diversion. Er, would you mind dousing the lights?"

Ten minutes had them out of the closet and hiding in a vacant doctor's office near the recovery ward. Something about the office rang horribly familiar with Ray, but he tried to put it from his mind: he had considerably greater luck once he got a load of Fraser wearing those scrubs and that headdress.

"All right," Fraser said. He pulled open the centre drawer of the desk and plucked a name tag, handing it to Ray: then he proceeded to pore over the folders on top of the desk. "Now according to this, Doctor, ah, Scagnetti has charge of two patients who were involved in a motorcycle accident last night, so he should be well occupied for a while. Wait here and count to thirty. I'll make my way to Hannah's room and extract her while you divert the nurses' attention."

"And how do you propose I do that?" Ray asked sagely as he affixed the name tag rather crookedly to the white coat's breast.

"Well, perhaps there's a wolf running loose in the recovery unit."

Uncertain of what he was even doing - much less whether it would work - Ray plunked down at the desk and looked over the documents pertaining to the motorcycle crash. Fraser, meanwhile, pressed his ear to the door and patiently awaited a lull in the activity outside. Then he gestured to Ray with a raised thumb and slipped out of the office.

That Mountie was apt to wash himself straight up the fecal-creek without a paddle one of these days, and it couldn't happen soon enough for Ray.

He played his part just the same, waiting after the door had closed, glaring across the office at nothing in particular as he silently mouthed the numbers to himself. _One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand._ God only knew what kind of trouble Fraser could be getting himself into out there.

Fraser, however, was keen to avoid trouble in all its finery as he hurried down the hall past the nurse's station. None of the nurses paid him any mind, much to his relief - it seemed that he sufficiently resembled most any other orderly scurrying about the corridors. He turned a corner and rushed down the corridor to Hannah's room.

 _Fifteen-thousand, sixteen-thousand, seventeen-thousand,_ Ray counted to himself. Where was the call for security?

Somehow Fraser had still managed to avoid it when he reached Hannah's room, slipped inside, and quickly made a shushing motion to her with his hand as he grabbed a wheelchair from the corner.

 _Twenty-thousand, twenty-one-thousand, twenty-two-thousand._ Ray got up from the doctor's desk, peeked out the door to make certain the coast was clear, and then withdrew to grab a stethoscope from the coat rack. _Twenty-eight-thousand, twenty-nine-thousand, thirty-thousand._ He took one more peek up and down the corridor, hung the stethoscope round his neck, and made haste down the hall toward the ICU.

He reached the nurse's station just in time to see Fraser pushing Hannah out of her room in the wheelchair only twenty metres away. He knocked on the counter, commanding the attention of the two nurses staffing the station.

"Just got a report of a wolf running crazy in the recovery unit," he told them. "Wanna put a call out and get hospital security on it?"

"A wolf?" One of the nurses stared at Ray as if he had two heads. "You're sure this isn't coming from the psychiatric ward?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"Well, sounds to me like a job for animal control," the second nurse suggested.

Ray shot a quick glance away from them, just long and just far enough to see Fraser and Hannah turning the corner, heading down toward the elevator. Regarding the nurses again, he continued: "You have any idea how long animal control is gonna take to get here? Even the Chicago P.D. would get on the scene in half the time." Seeing the sceptical looks he was getting, he added: "Okay, maybe three-quarters."

"Well, then, by all means let's give the Chicago P.D. a call," the second nurse said.

"Hold on just a second." The first nurse clapped her hand over the phone receiver and squinted askance at Ray's name tag. "Isn't Dr. Scagnetti supposed to be in surgery today?"

"Well, he - I - " Ray never quite finished. The first nurse jumped out of her chair at the sound of a sharp, spirited bark coming from somewhere down the corridor. Looking past her, Ray couldn't suppress a smile as he saw Diefenbaker prancing around the intersection of two corridors a short distance away, just before he dropped to all fours and ran out of view.

"You know what?" Ray said, showing his palm. "Never mind. I'll take care of it." And he hurried back the way he had come.

He returned to Dr. Scagnetti's office at almost the same instant Fraser and Hannah reached the linen closet. In absolute and impenetrable blackness, Fraser had stowed away the wheelchair, shucked the scrubs, and recovered his uniform before Hannah even had time to breathe. As he gently herded her out of the closet and down the hall to the elevator, Ray discarded coat and name tag and almost tripped over Diefenbaker as he slipped back out of the office. The excitement had been plenty for the wolf, who yapped excitedly and pawed at Ray's leg.

"Yeah, yeah, down, boy," Ray said, pushing Diefenbaker back. "Nice job. C'mon, let's get the hell outa here before security catches up with both of us."

* * *

 

"That was actually fun." Hannah's optimism, Fraser couldn't help noticing, had grown steadily every block they drove from the hospital to her building. "You were like heroes for hire, you know? Just like the A-Team."

"Yeah, we're the 'Eh'-Team, all right," Ray said dryly, emphasising the 'eh'. "Hang out with a Mountie long enough and it'll start coming to you naturally before you can say 'Dudley Do-Right'." He swung the Riviera over to the kerb in front of the renovated mill, keeping his eyes peeled as he got out and walked round the car to the sidewalk.

Hannah got out of the car next and smiled half-heartedly as she looked up the front wall of the building. Home, once a place of comfort and safety, but now a place of danger and death if she wasn't careful.

"Home, sweet mill," she sighed. Almost at once she dropped her line of sight and took an apprehensive look around, as if expecting to see an assault rifle pointing at her from a nearby window. Fraser clambered out of the Riviera's back seat in the meantime, Diefenbaker close behind, both adding their trained observers' eyes to Hannah's as they looked about their surroundings.

"You don't see anyone disturbingly familiar, do you?" Fraser enquired.

"At least I'm not in a crossfire between John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald." Hannah swallowed audibly and then hurried to the front door.

"You know, I'm still not too crazy about this idea," Ray remarked as they walked down the long wood-floored hall to Hannah's apartment. "If they got to you here once...."

"But this is the only way," Hannah insisted. "The only place I can show you what you need to see."

"Well, do you have a phone, at least?" Ray asked.

"A phone," Hannah scoffed. "A necessary evil. An electronic serpent, that's all it is. If you ask me, Alexander Graham Bell should be condemned to spend eternity answering his own infernal invention."

"Okay, well, when we're done condemning people, you wanna give me the number?"

"Ray does have a point, Hannah," Fraser chimed in, seeing her hesitant look. "Perhaps....Would it be too much of a distraction if we were to leave Diefenbaker on guard?"

"It's a new moon tonight. Nothing there for him to howl at."

"Aah, just feed him a bag of Cheetos and he'll be happy," Ray said. He tried to fight a sardonic smile as Diefenbaker growled angrily at him.

"Diefenbaker!" Fraser snapped. "That's completely inappropriate in the presence of a lady!" Drawing to a halt at Hannah's door, he squatted in front of the wolf and took hold of his snout, holding him in eye contact. "Now, I expect you to stay here and keep watch while Hannah works. Keep your eyes, ears, and nose....well, I suppose not your ears, but you will stay on the alert." As Diefenbaker rumbled and yipped again, Fraser continued: "Perhaps an extra ration of dog biscuits is what's in it for you. But only, I repeat, only so long as you do what's expected of you. Hannah's safety is in your hands....well, paws." He stood up straight and responded to Ray's shaken head with an impassive stare.

As soon as she walked through the door, Hannah gravitated straight to the closet on the far side of the loft stairs. She inhaled the paint-pungent air and smiled comfortedly at the familiar smell of her home. In quick succession she withdrew a collapsible stool, a large blank canvas, and a dark blue jacket from the closet, unslinging her arm. Fraser watched carefully and didn't miss the wince as she awkwardly tried to slip the paint-stained jacket on.

"Here, let me, ah...." He moved up next to her and slid the left sleeve up Hannah's injured arm. He repeated the process on her right, rewarded with a grateful smile.

"Thank you," Hannah said softly. She re-slung her arm and reached into the closet for a sheet even more paint-stained than the jacket. With help from both Fraser and Ray, she moved easel, canvas, stool, and sheet to a spot against the outer wall between two of the windows. Here another grey sheet covered a patch of the floor, two adjustable lamps standing to either side: here Hannah set up, pausing and staring intently at the blank canvas before she turned around.

"I need to be alone now," she said to Fraser and Ray.

Fraser silently nodded assent, but Ray wasn't so accepting. "All right, look," he murmured. "We won't be far off. We'll keep an eye out and check back up on you first thing tomorrow. Meanwhile, anything happens, you get the hell out of here and call me, you understand?"

Hannah nodded, but then her large blue eyes narrowed. "When you do come, how will I know it's you?"

"That's an excellent point," Fraser said. "Perhaps we should arrange a password of some sort."

"A password?" Hannah's face brightened. "I know one."

Exiting the building several minutes later, Ray stared up the front wall and sighed. "Sure hope she knows what she's doing."

"I'd say she knows much better than anyone. Not to worry, Ray. She's in good hands....well, paws."

Together Fraser and Ray embarked on a slow walk down the street, constantly looking back at the mill whilst trying to see ahead, hoping against hope that they hadn't abandoned the poor girl to an unpleasant death - or worse.

* * *

 

_(Fanmix: first 2:50 of["The Mystic's Dream"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf8NUJaCS1Q) by Loreena McKennitt)_

Over the years it had become a ritual, almost: she never wavered from it, and she always turned out a work of blinding quality in an enviable time. Once when she was little, she'd overheard her father complaining that she was off in another world somewhere, a world he couldn't see or understand. And he'd been perfectly correct. And to this day Hannah failed to see the problem.

Into that otherworld she now slid, as if she'd found a hidden door to it at the back of a closet. The rest of her apartment, the rest of the world, vanished around her as every cell in her body came to bear on the canvas in front of her. Her good right hand passed back and forth before her face as if disembodied, bearing a graphite stick that she scraped with firm, even strokes across the top of the canvas. Light horizontal lines and heavy vertical lines appeared and Hannah's world started to form within them. Deeper into it she reached, into a world of surreal image, familiar scent, and ethereal sound.

She never even noticed when orange time came. Fraser, Ray, Diefenbaker, Slade, the demon - they all ceased to exist for her. Only her mother remained as a vague vestige in her memory, and then only as she reached back into it, pulled out every shape, every angle, every line, every texture she remembered from the first two versions. Line after line, shade after shade, contour after contour, her world took shape again, the shape of the Chicago skyline.

The tree-stacked foreground appeared before her eyes as it appeared before her mind. Taking up the entire lower half of the canvas, it stood with all the starkness of nature against the cityscape she'd sketched out on the background. Blue time came and went, and night fell. Hannah breathed deeply, licked her lower lip and revelled in the warm tingle she felt pervading her entire body. Warm and familiar, the tingle of creation and expression, and for her, communication. With excitement she stroked the graphite stick faster and faster across the canvas as she watched her world come to life again beneath her hands.

__  
\/

Darkness was come, but Fraser and Ray stayed close, practising the password as they kept an eye on the building. Pedestrians passed, tenants came, tenants went: no one showed an unnerving interest in Hannah's third-floor windows, no shots rang out, and Diefenbaker raised no alarms. Still practising the password with each other and to themselves, they split up, first to keep both sets of eyes on different parts of the building, and then to allow each other to take cat naps in the Riviera's front seat. On his every watch, Ray's gun hand twitched restlessly, but his phone remained silent, no signs of danger showed. On watch or off, Fraser's senses worked overtime to keep him ready for action.

__  
\/

Hannah's paint palette appeared in her left hand as if by magic. With the horizontal strokes of a half-inch brush, the sky met the background in bright, warm, living colour. The city skyline caught reflections of the rising sun on windows and spires, cast shadows, stood out before the sunrise in living grey, black, and infinite shades of red and brown. Then Hannah anointed a small sponge with emerald green, and the foreground came to life in all its pastorality. Nature stood out against man-made structure with even greater contrast in Hannah's leaden, oily, canvas world: there the sun came up long before it made its appearance in the real one, the only evidence of any passage of time.

__  
\/

Time still passed relentlessly on the outside, but in Slade's corner it seemed to pass with agonising slowness. He had no idea how many times he woke up during the night, staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, drifting back off, only to wake up again an hour or so later. Was she all right, or had her demon come after her again? Had she narrowly escaped a second time? If there was a second attempt, who would be there to prevent it? The unanswered questions drove him crazier and crazier every time he woke up and looked at the clock to see that the night was far from over. He was a locomotive engineer by career choice, but still a soldier at heart. He still had service to render and he couldn't render it lying in bed going stir crazy over Hannah.

__  
\/

The textures, the shades, the details came next. Outside, grey time passed, and she was almost finished. _Please, let this be the last time,_ she prayed. _Please let me live long enough to see my world meet the real one._ Heart apace, breathing deep and inspired, Hannah touched up the sky, then the background, then the foreground with more graphite and pastel. She looked from one side of the canvas to the other, a smile creeping across her face as a flush of excitement coursed through her. She felt as if she was looking through a window, a portal between her world and everyone else's. As yellow time arrived, anyone looking at the canvas would have sworn that she'd punched out the bricks of her apartment's outer wall and created a new window to the sunrise.

_Success._

__  
\/

Fraser and Ray met up across the street from the mill not a minute before a grey Dodge Ram appeared out of a shaft of early-morning sunlight less than a block away. As it pulled up to the kerb behind the Riviera, the two men remained wary at first, until they spotted Slade getting out of the truck. Breathing easier, they quickly crossed the street and met him as he reached the building's front door, hesitating at the sight of their approach.

"Any word?" he asked.

"She's been at it all night," Fraser said. "If she's not already finished, she must be getting close."

"Well, I say we get up there and find out," Ray yawned.

They approached Hannah's apartment to see Diefenbaker still at the door. As ordered, he was still alert and staring expectantly at Fraser as if to say, All right, I did what you told me, now where are my dog biscuits?

"Good boy, Diefenbaker," Fraser said with an approving nod. He made no mention of biscuits and incurred no response from the wolf, save a wide yawn. He stepped around him to the door and loudly, firmly knocked twice.

"Who's there?" Hannah's voice from the other side of the door sounded slightly tinged with nerves.

"Password," Fraser replied.

"Password who?"

Fraser glanced at Ray and raised his eyebrows. Rolling his eyes, Ray began: "One hen."

"Two ducks," Fraser picked up.

"Three squawking geese."

"Four Limerick oysters."

"Five corpulent porpoises." Ray had to speak very slowly and enunciate, but still he barely avoided stumbling over the words.

"Six pair of Don Alverzo's tweezers," Fraser went on.

"Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array."

"Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt."

Ray swallowed and took a deep breath. "Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth."

Fraser, however, barely seemed to inhale. "Ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who haul stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery at the very same time."

The door swung wide, and Hannah beamed, and then she beamed brighter still at the sight of Slade standing behind Ray. "I'm finished," she announced proudly, holding the door open to allow all three men - and wolf - into the apartment. Slade's heart fluttered: it was the first time he'd seen the vastness of Hannah's talent, and suddenly he felt very insignificant and useless as he and the others threaded their way around the easels over to Hannah's work station.

The painting of the Chicago skyline seemed to give off sunlight all its own, quickly and yet beautifully rendered in oil and graphite.

"Wow," Ray observed, wide-eyed.

"Most impressive," Fraser nodded. "You viewed this scene from an elevation, I see."

Hannah nodded. "Mmm-hmm. The high ground is a natural advantage."

"That's very true." Fraser turned. "Well, Slade? Does anything here look familiar to you?"

Slade stepped closer, his eyes like lasers. Just from the look in them, Fraser already knew the answer to the question, but he waited for Slade to bend over, nodding his head slowly as he scrutinised the painting's foreground.

"Yeah," he murmured. "Yeah, something does. Hannah, where did you take this view in from?"

"A - a rooftop on Pacific Avenue." Hannah averted her gaze away from his, swallowing. "No street up there, no noise, just air and light and wind. I can hear better what the city has to tell me. It has a long story. It wanted me to tell it on the breeze."

"Yeah, all the way back to the nineteen hundreds, by the look of it."

"What makes you say that?" Ray enquired.

"See this?" Slade pointed at an old brick building in the foreground, at the very bottom of the canvas. "It's a foodstuffs warehouse converted from an engine shed. Used to be part of the old shop complex at the Franklin Park yard. The rest of the complex is out of view here - " He waved his finger at the painting, but Hannah caught his hand and held it still at a distance. He started, but then he looked at her, surprised, and though he'd never admit it, ever so slightly aroused.

"It's not dry yet," she told him. "Don't make a mess."

"Sorry." Slade withdrew his hand and looked away.

"A shop complex, you say?" Fraser probed.

"Yeah, dates back to the steam days. It's been shut down and abandoned since the early eighties. Only reason most of the buildings are still standing is all the asbestos in the walls. And then just a couple of years ago, some logistics company came in and took over this shed here. Last time I saw it up close was last summer, when I spotted a few garbage cars nearby to haul out some construction debris."

"So does anything look out of the ordinary?" Ray asked.

"Maybe." Slade frowned deeply as he peered still closer and harder at the shed, wiggling a finger. "Hannah, you're sure this is exactly everything you saw when you painted this the first time?"

"I'm positive." Hannah nodded, perfectly doubtless of her work.

"Well, this is new." Slade indicated the eroding foundation of the shed, beneath which he could see several swellings of white matter, flecked with red and dark blue, that resembled puffy pollution clouds. "These white puffs underneath? They weren't there the last time I saw it."

"Maybe it's some kind of a sealant," Ray suggested. "Or insulation."

"Hardly smacks of a motive for murder, though," Fraser dissented. "No, it looks....Slade, is there a way we can gain access to this structure?"

"There is if you don't mind a little communing with nature. Other than the access road, there's two lead tracks. One comes in off the Milwaukee District main line at River Grove, the other one comes in from the Franklin Park yard. Either way, Old Man Winter is gonna be really happy to see you."

"Yeah, well, I bet the feeling's gonna be mutual," Ray said, half-smiling and shooting a sidelong glance Fraser's way.

"We'd best be moving." Fraser ignored the jab and turned to Hannah. "I don't think you should stay here for very long. If your assailants should make another attempt on your life...."

"We'll go to my mother's house," Hannah said quietly. "The demon don't know where she lives. We'll be all right there."

"Very well. Ray?" Fraser cocked his head toward the door and turned to leave, moving with heavy steps to get Diefenbaker's attention.

"All right, well, if there's trouble, you know where to reach me," Ray said. Hannah nodded and Ray trailed after Fraser, nonplussed by the thought of even letting her out of his sight until he'd closed the case.

"Well," Slade said, rubbing his lower lip after the other two men and the wolf had gone. "You, uh....you need a ride to your mom's or anything?"

"No." Hannah smiled. "Not right now. Right now, what I need is for you to sit down." And she made a beeline for her supply closet as Slade watched her, baffled.

 

Diefenbaker scampered across the sidewalk toward the Riviera, eager for the promised extra ration of dog biscuits. Fraser, however, hesitated halfway between building and car, looking up the front wall, thinking of all the other times he and Ray had left one of their charges alone only for trouble to strike moments later - Joey Paducci was first to spring to mind, the Tsimshian masks a close second.

"C'mon, Fraser, time's a-wasting!" Ray called over his shoulder as he headed for the driver's side of the Riviera.

"Be that as it may, I submit it would set my mind at much greater ease if we stay close just for a few minutes."

"Submit this, submit that, why don't you write an editorial for the Chicago Tribune while you're at it?"

"In regards to what?"

"I dunno, how about crabgrass?"

"I'm afraid in that case I'd be little more than a voice in an opera." Fraser didn't take his eyes off the mill until Ray had driven them away and he could no longer turn his head far enough to keep an eye on it. The hospital staff, he considered, had been none the wiser to them sneaking Hannah out and back home: the demon, were they to come after her again, should have no certainty of where she was. And Slade, an experienced if shell-shocked former soldier, was still with her. With these thoughts Fraser tried to convince himself that Hannah would be all right, but a klaxon alarm kept going off in the back of his head and no angling of his Stetson could silence it.

Still, Fraser couldn't resist ruminating on what he saw happening between his two new acquaintances. There was Hannah, a young, beautiful woman with a unique view of the world that she translated through her abundant talent for visual art. And there was Slade, an only slightly older and ruggedly handsome man who carried his conscience around with him as if he was to be crucified on it at the eleventh hour. He'd reacted visibly to Hannah grabbing his hand: and without much precedent beyond her insistence about the demon, she had clearly said _"we'll_ go to my mother's house." Fraser believed in destiny, even if it was a destiny of one's own choosing. A dire circumstance had brought those two together, and it would interest him to see if they would stay together after he and Ray got to the bottom of the case.

That, of course, required that they get to the bottom of it without losing life or limb - _anybody's_ life or limb. Fraser had a terribly uneasy feeling about the white, sacklike puffs Hannah had painted and Slade had pointed out underneath the warehouse. That must be the detail she'd expected him to notice. They'd find out about those soon enough - he could only hope they found out the easy way and came out of it more or less intact.

* * *

 

"An artist's work is never done, huh?" Slade said casually, letting his stare roam over the sea of paint and charcoal in Hannah's living space. Eventually it came to rest on a pastoral watercolour of a farmer feeding hay to a flock of sheep.

"It's done over. And over again." Hannah hunched over on her stool, a sketch pad in her left hand and a No. 2 pencil in her right. "Please, Slade, hold still."

Slade took the hint and froze every muscle in his body, but he still shot a sidelong glance at her from the chair in the middle of the floor. "So I have to ask you this. What made you think I'd recognise anything in your painting?"

"You recognised the drawing, remember?" Hannah said simply. "It's the same building. I thought maybe....maybe you would recognise the demon, too."

"No, I'm pretty sure I don't. But then it sure would help if I knew who the demon is."

 _"Are,"_ Hannah said emphatically. "Who the demon _are._ I wish someone would understand."

"I wish I could, too. But I don't know you that well, Hannah. And I sure don't - "

"That's what my father used to say." Hannah pouted and stared at the sketch pad, her forehead wrinkling as she tried to keep her expression in check. "When he was still there. He didn't know me. He didn't know what kind of world I was in. Why couldn't he have a normal child. Why did he have to keep spending dollar after dollar on doctor after doctor to fix what was wrong with me. But was _anything_ really wrong with me? Did he _have_ to get upset with me if I had a temper tantrum? Why couldn't he just leave me alone and let me draw? There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"

"No," Slade murmured, shaking his head sadly. All of a sudden he felt horridly bad for Hannah, having a parent who couldn't and wouldn't understand her and leave her to her own devices. He wondered how many other autistic children had been through the same early-age hellfire and whether they had any hope of being accepted as they were by those closest to them.

"I'm sorry, Hannah," he said finally. "I'm real sorry. I didn't know it was that hard on you." He faced away, his gaze coming to rest on a brightly coloured oil painting of a square-rigged sailing ship high on a rippled sea, with a man and a woman standing in a half-embrace pose on its forecastle. There he rested his gaze and let his mind drift. And still, he felt a warm tingle starting at the back of his neck and coursing down his spine like a vial of warm oil as he felt Hannah's eyes on him. They scarcely left the side of his head as her hands darted up and down the sketch pad in her lap, swiftly lining and shading the details. He wondered what she was trying to tell him with this piece.

"Why are you always sorry?" Hannah asked, quite suddenly.

"What do you mean?"

"You're always sorry for something. You're always so nervous."

"Well, combat will do that to you." _And sitting alone with an inexcusably pretty girl like you comes in distant second._

"Are you sure you're not Canadian?"

Slade shot a narrow-eyed sidelong glance at her. "You know you're the second woman who's asked me about that lately?"

"No. Who was first? Was it your girlfriend?"

Involuntarily, Slade broke his pose and looked straight at her. "And who the hell is that, pray tell?"

"You rhymed again," Hannah informed him, smiling broadly. Then her line of vision fell back to the sketch pad and she swallowed. "Doesn't your girlfriend know where you come from?"

"What is this mythological creature you speak of, this 'girlfriend'?" Slade dropped the act and scoffed. "There's no such person. There ain't been since I came home from the war."

 _"Hasn't_ been." Hannah fell silent and concentrated on drawing for several more seconds. "So who else asked you?"

"Actually, it was Constable Fraser's boss."

"Oh." Hannah glanced at him and then at her growing sketch of him. "He's really handsome, don't you think? Mr. Pelt, I mean."

"Well, I guess so, considering I don't lean that way," Slade said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. "But, uh....what about you? Anyone look at you and like what they see?"

"Not unless they want something for themselves. Be it a slice of still life, an unfortunate truth, or just something to laugh at, some weirdness to tease and reject. An advantage they can take for themselves. No one sees the real person, only....shadow."

Slade became conscious that Hannah's hands had stilled. He looked at her, but all he could see was the frown on her face as she stared at the paper. From his vantage point, he couldn't see the thin bar-like shadow traversing the length of the paper from top to bottom.

Hannah turned to find the source of the shadow and at the same time she and Slade spotted a window washer hanging outside. But suddenly and to his utter mortefaction, Slade realised that it was no ordinary window washer - it took him a poor second to realise why.

"Ohhh, no, no, no, you son of a...." he snarled. _"Get down!"_ He catapulted from his chair toward Hannah and knocked her to the floor, wincing at her high-pitched shriek of surprise. At almost the same time the window washer cut loose with a sawed-off shotgun he'd been holding on top of his wiper stick. The shell smashed four of the window's panes and ripped into one corner of the newly completed painting, knocking the easel over backwards.

"The demon!" Hannah screamed, covering her head. _"The demon!"_

"Yeah, guess now we know who it is," Slade snapped. "Come on!" He jolted upright and grabbed Hannah's hand in a death grip. Pulling her to her feet, he yanked her with him out the door as a second blast from the shotgun embedded itself in the door right beside her head.

"My truck's out front!" Slade cajoled her toward the north end of the hallway. "C'mon, let's go!"

"No!" Hannah yanked sharply on his arm. "They'll be waiting outside! We have to hide! The underground railroad, it'll be safer!"

"Damn it, Hannah, this ain't the Civil War! We gotta get out of here!"

"I know the way! Just follow me!" Another desperate pull on Slade's arm was enough to win him over. Blindly he followed her, running down the hall opposite of the way he had come.

* * *

 

 _"Overfishing?"_ Ray said incredulously, staring across the car at Fraser for so long that he blew a red traffic light. "Are you serious?"

"I've never been more so," Fraser replied. "And the packages of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil that the perpetrator used to bomb the rivers bore a disturbing resemblance to those Hannah painted underneath that warehouse."

"Only in Canada," Ray muttered. His head was on its third shake when his phone rang. "Wanna get that?"

"Certainly." Fraser took a deep breath as he answered the phone, incurring a cringe from Ray. "You have reached the mobile desk of Detective Raymond Vecchio. This is Const - " He broke off, his expression stunned. "Hannah? Are you - all right. Yes. Yes, I understand." He shot a look at Ray, who immediately started to slow down.

"All right, find a place to take shelter," Fraser said tersely. "We'll be back in just a few minutes." He shut the phone's mouthpiece and nodded once at Ray. "They've been fired upon."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that," Ray snapped. "Gimme the light!"

"Right you are!" Fraser barely had time to grab the red emergency light and place it on the dashboard before Ray jerked the Riviera into a hard 180-degree turn, the immense centrifugal force throwing Fraser up against his door. Ray ignored yelling motorists and howling horns as he screeched into the opposite lane and smashed the accelerator flat.

_(Fanmix -["Into the Fire"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttaa1QJzoGo) by Sarah McLachlan)_

Hannah hung up the phone in the basement just in time to see Slade barricading the door with a length of lead pipe he'd jammed into the grated steps. That done, he leapt down the short flight of steps from door to floor and joined Hannah in taking cover behind a fuel-oil manifold adjoining the furnace.

"If that's even gonna hold 'em, I don't know for how long," he panted. "Now where the hell are you taking us?"

"Mr. Pelt told us to take shelter till he and Mr. Nose get back. Helter-skelter in a summer swelter, the birds fly off to a fallout shelter. It's down here! Come on!" Taking Slade's hand, Hannah led him at sprinter's pace across the basement: he wished in vain that he hadn't slacked off on calisthenics since his discharge from the Army. He heard Hannah's wordless cry almost at the same time as a loud metallic bang on the basement door, only seconds before she jarred to a halt at another door on the far side. A metal sign adorned with three yellow, downward-pointing triangles and the label FALLOUT SHELTER hung on the door, which Hannah flung wide, wasting no more words as she led Slade on another hasty descent. At the bottom of the flight of a dozen wooden stairs, a long and dank passageway ran off into infinity, dimly lit by a string of construction lanterns hanging from the wall. Down the passageway Hannah dashed, Slade half a breath behind.

* * *

 

Ray hadn't so much as tapped the brake pedal since the call came, and he still ventured nowhere near it as he slewed the Riviera into the opposing lane again, cutting off a half-dozen cars passing the mill in the other direction. He crammed in between Slade's truck and the car parked in front of it, bounced halfway onto the sidewalk and drew his gun as he and Fraser bolted from car back to building: he'd already snapped the safety off by the time they reached the door.

"Check her apartment," Fraser told him. "I'll search this level!" He dashed for the hallway that traversed the length of the mill, but no sooner had he and Ray parted ways than a loud and sharp bang, reminiscent of a stick of dynamite, drew their attention to the far south end. Without so much as a warning shout, they abandoned Plan A and ran like hell down the hall toward the source of the explosion.

At the other end they came upon the basement door, hanging ajar with its knob and bolt obliterated. Fraser tarried only a moment to read the signs, the muscles in his jaw working even faster than his pulse. "C-three explosive charge," he announced.

"Oh, great," Ray snapped. "So we're up against a one-man bomb squad?!"

"Assuming there's only one man." Taking the steps two at a time, Fraser hit the floor in only a second and led Ray at a dead run across the basement.

In all, six persons had descended below ground level under the mill: Hannah and Slade, Fraser and Ray, and between them, two armed men. The one with the shotgun led his partner through the fallout shelter's passageway, relying on the dim light from the string of lanterns and their own swift-footedness to catch up to their prey. They rounded a jog in the passageway to receive a faceful of scalding hot steam from an open relief valve, and Slade close on its joint, showing more characteristics of an angry grizzly bear than a man. Roaring without a word, he leapt from a patch of darkness of his own creation and rammed his head into the gunman's stomach. The impact hurled the gunman backward into his partner, knocking both of them flat: the shotgun went flying, only for Slade to grab it by its stock and swing it around. He took haphazard aim and pulled the front trigger.

As if mocking him, the gun merely clacked.

Hissing ferally, Slade pulled the other trigger - but it, too, responded with only a dry, impotent click. The gunman hadn't bothered to reload, opting instead to use the gun as a mere threat. In desperation, Slade reversed the shotgun again, but he ran a poor second behind the gunman's partner bolting upright, jumping over the gunman and crashing into Slade head-on before he could swing the weapon. They rolled about the dirty, damp floor of the passageway, punching and snarling, both of them losing sight of the gunman as he scrambled to his feet, leapt over them and splashed through an old puddle of standing water beneath a leaking steam pipe.

Hannah knew she should be far away up the passage by this time, but she couldn't force herself to leave Slade, for his sake or her own. Only the gunman's approach galvanised her into turning and running for her life. Slade and his opponent had lost all track of the other two players: Fraser and Ray had just reached the entrance to the fallout shelter and pounded down the stairs, racing through the passage toward the sounds of the struggle.

Finally Slade wrenched himself into a posture upright enough to grab his adversary by the collar, slam his head into the floor and bury his knee in the man's stomach. He jumped to his feet - ramming one and then the other into the man's chest and head - and scrambled down the passage away from him, shouting Hannah's name. She answered at once from somewhere in the darkness not far ahead, but the ripping patch of distress in her voice set Slade's nerves on edge. Not a dozen paces and he jolted to a halt, all of his energy centred in his heart, which pounded somewhere around the point of fibrillation as Hannah came into view. Her expression was sick with terror. On either side of her stood the gunman and a third man who had cut off her escape from the other end of the passage, holding a taser dangerously close to her neck.

"Slade - help - " she barely managed to squeak before the gunman clamped a great ham of a hand around her throat.

"Oh, now that's it," Slade hissed. "Lay the mitts off, you sick sack of - " He had just undertaken a brazen rush at the two thugs when the third man lit off the taser. He administered only a split-second shock, but Hannah shrieked nonetheless: Slade jerked to a stop again, just in time to feel the pricking point of a knife in his back, directly between his lungs.

"Wanna go another round, sonny?" the gunman's partner rumbled from behind him. His voice still had the wheeze of exertion and pain from his fight with Slade, but the knife gave him an unassailable upper hand.

 _"Police! Freeze!"_ Ray's voice reverberated throughout the passageway. He and Fraser had just negotiated the jog in the passage behind the battle, blocking the way where they stood abreast. "Lose the blade, dirtbag! Let 'em go!"

The knife man was startled - just startled enough to push the knife into Slade's back, almost far enough to puncture his jacket and prick his skin. Slade grimaced, but resisted a painful grunt until the knife man yanked him backward and spun around, beholding Ray with his gun levelled and Fraser with his Stetson in his hands. He grabbed Slade by the collar and pulled him around in a half-circle, knife in his back again, using him for a human shield as he dragged him back to join his cohorts.

"Why don't you lose the piece, fuzz-face," the gunman snarled. For emphasis, the taser man shocked Hannah again - her scream froze Ray and Fraser dead in their tracks on the opposite side of the puddle of water on the floor.

"There's no way out," Fraser grated. "Your escape route's cut off - "

"That's why we got backup, Red," the gunman said, grinning evilly. "Now why don't you be a nice fella, lose the iron, and let us walk outa here. Otherwise your pretty little friend here's gonna get the shock of her life."

Hannah was whimpering, her eyes squeezed shut, wishing in vain that the nightmare would be over when she opened them. Slade stared steadily at Fraser and Ray, his face trembling with rage, rage at the three thugs for catching him at a disadvantage, and rage at himself for letting Hannah down. But in the three attackers Fraser could read nothing but cold, hard hate. They regarded the young man and woman in their clutches as little more than household pests to be disposed of with some deadly concoction of chemicals.

"Not gonna happen, punk," Ray growled.

"You ever bet anyone else's life on somethin'?" the gunman returned. "Vern! Let 'em have it!"

At once the knife man yanked Slade backward, prodded the knife into his back again and shoved him roughly toward the others. Before Slade could retaliate, the knife man jumped across the passage to the string of lanterns and severed the cord with his blade. Before the passageway plunged into total darkness, the last thing Fraser and Ray saw was the knife man hurling the cord toward the puddle of water between them. Instinctively, Fraser jumped backward, hastening to put his hat back on his head and cover his eyes in the same motion.

A great strobe-like arc of electricity shot upward and outward from the point of contact between cord and puddle, just enough for Fraser and Ray to see the three hoods dragging their two hostages off down the passageway. The cord continued to arc violently, breaking the bulbs in the lanterns one at a time with blinding showers of sparks. Trying to shield their faces from the bursting bulbs, the two men could make out vicious laughter, one last bark of defiance from Slade, one last yelp from Hannah, and indistinct voices fading away into the darkness.

"Damn it, damn it, _damn it!"_ Ray cursed loudly. He scarcely restrained himself from flinging his gun to the floor in frustration.

"Damn it is right," Fraser puffed. He wasn't given to cursing of any intensity, but he shared in the nightmare right alongside his friends - watching them being hauled off captives as his last hope of pursuit burnt away in the electrified puddle.


	5. Chapter 5

"All right, Elaine, whaddya got?" Ray demanded as he burst through the main doors into the bullpen.

"We got prints off the shotgun," Elaine replied, hefting an open folder. "Gunman's name is Hector Steever. He's got priors for assault, B and E, petty theft, and more traffic violations than you can shake a stick at."

"What was his last assault?"

"He roughed up a protester at Belmont Park last year. A construction company called Lango Enterprises had filed their intent to purchase park land from the city and build a cargo transload facility. It went over with the neighbours about as well as a fire-bomb raid. Steever and two others were brought in, but the charges were dropped two days later."

"Rings familiar, doesn't it?" Fraser said from Elaine's other shoulder.

Ray nodded grimly. "The name sure does. You go find Frannie. I'll handle Welsh." Without waiting for an acknowledgement or a protest, he turned and marched away across the squad room.

"Oh, dear," Fraser mumbled. He hardly relished the prospect of speaking to Francesca one-on-one, without Ray there to keep her off of him.

"Hey," Elaine said, touching his arm. "Just relax. Be yourself. If you ask me, there's plenty worse people you could be."

"I suppose that's valid." Fraser smiled weakly as he scraped his thumbnail across his eyebrow with unconscious vigour. Still, he had to force his legs to start moving - getting his vocal cords to cooperate with his brain would be a challenge at best.

He found Francesca in the lunch room, setting up a buffet and swag table. "Er, Francesca," he hailed her. "If, ah, if I may have...."

"Ooh!" Francesca squealed with delight, spinning around to face him. "You want my phone number? How about my house keys?"

"Uh...."

"My perfume? My favourite nightie? For that matter, you can always have my v - "

"Very sorry, Francesca, but time is running short," Fraser interrupted. "The sports complex you mentioned, the one that replaced Rosemont Plaza. What can you tell me about it?"

"It cost me one hell of a business opportunity, for one thing," Francesca groused. "You could have come taken a nice deep whiff of my herbal therapy and body-scent shop by now if they hadn't taken my land."

"You mean Lango Enterprises?" Fraser squinted.

"Yeah, the owner is a walking safe deposit box. Nobody wanted Rosemont Plaza to go, so don't ask me whose wheels he greased to make it happen."

"I see," Fraser said, nodding. "Have they pre-empted your business plan on any other occasion?"

"No, but they're still going all out to tick the neighbours off by tearing up public land. Belmont Park looks like it's gonna be next. And it looks like this time they're gonna go right through with it."

"What makes you think that?"

"It's right on the edge of this old industrial site between Belmont Park and Franklin Park. It's been shut down for years and I hear it's ripe to get redeveloped."

Fraser drew himself up ramrod-straight, staring at Francesca so hard that she felt as if she'd shrunk to the size of a pica. "What?" she squeaked. "What'd I say?"

"Thank you kindly, Francesca," Fraser's tone had all the intensity of a solar flare. He whirled around and made tracks back to the corridor.

"Well - well, hang on!" Francesca called after him. "Sure you don't want my v...."

 

"Vern DeNorden," Elaine read from the infobox beneath the mug shot on her computer screen. "He and Steever were brought in together after the Belmont Park incident."

"Let me guess, charges dropped?" Ray surmised.

"Good guess. Their rap sheets are practically blood-related. DeNorden was brought up on assault charges in eighty-six for going in to break a longshoremen's strike on the South Shore. A couple of years ago, he caught a B and E for breaking into the main office of a general contractor, the Gillemare Corporation. Competition between them and Lango Enterprises is hot and heavy."

"Fraser!" Ray hollered at his partner re-entering the squad room from the side door. "Get a load of this!"

Immediately Fraser diverted from Ray's desk to Elaine's, leaning over her shoulder opposite Ray. "That's the dirtbag who had the knife to Slade's back," Ray said, tapping the mug shot.

"So it is," Fraser observed.

"What'd Frannie say?"

"Well," Fraser inhaled deeply, "she's, er, very willing to offer all that she can." Catching a perturbed look from Ray, he quickly added: "To the local retail sector, that is. But she was confounded beyond measure when that opportunity was grabbed out from under her. Nevertheless, Ray, I think you would be pleased and proud to know that she refuses to take such a setback as a sign that she shouldn't - "

"All right, already, Fraser, never mind the preamble to the Constitution, just get out with it!" Ray snapped impatiently.

"Ah, sorry. If you recall the industrial site that Slade identified near the warehouse, Francesca tells me it's a would-be starting point for a construction project being undertaken by Lango Enterprises. Between the O'Hare sports complex and this park redevelopment, it appears that some of their recent endeavours are showing an undeniable pattern."

"Well, then, let's get after 'em while the getting's good," Ray resolved.

"Not so fast, Vecchio." Welsh accosted the gathering, dropping his reading glasses into his shirt pocket. "If you're gonna take on Thomas Lango, you'd better have not only an airtight charge to lay on him, but plenty of heavy artillery."

"Thomas Lango, sir?" Fraser repeated.

"The man makes Al Capone look like a pickpocket. For years he's been squeezing logistics businesses all around the South Shore for every penny they can give him and his banking clan. There's widespread suspicion that he sent in south-side muscle like Steever to force their owners to sign everything over. Trouble is, all the documentation shows that he legally owns every one of them, and there's no evidence of strong-arming. To top it all off, he donates over twenty million dollars a year to his own charity partnership, the Hathaway Lango Foundation."

"It's a sweet set-up," Elaine weighed in. "As long as he keeps making yearly donations to charity, he can use every one of those businesses as a tax write-off. He profits, they suffer."

Ray sighed with frustration. "Look, Lieutenant, we can't just stand here and piss and moan," he said, spastically waving his hands up and down. "These guys took hostages. Who's to say we'll even find 'em alive!"

"Then you'd better get some spying eyes out there, Detective," Welsh told him. "Because when Commander O'Neill asks me why I'm whistling up an emergency response team on your behalf, she's gonna want an explanation in excruciating detail. And I want to be able to give her that explanation without having to inhale."

"On it, sir," Ray acknowledged. With nary a breath himself, he strode behind Elaine and clapped Fraser on the arm. "Heigh-ho, Silver, Benny!"

"Actually, it's red serge," Fraser corrected as he hurried off to the side door after Ray.

* * *

_(Fanmix:["Fully Completely" ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORpUgre_SYs)by The Tragically Hip)_

 

"How the hell do you even expect to find 'em?" Ray demanded as he rode herd on the Riviera, hurtling along a cross-town street toward the west side.

"The fallout shelter," Fraser answered. "It must have another exit. All we need to do is find it."

"With the time we have left? We're lucky if Hannah and Slade are still alive as we speak!"

"Well, Mr. Steever and his cohorts had ample opportunity and means to kill both of them where they stood. That means they must want them alive for something."

"Still doesn't give us any idea where to find 'em," Ray said, his voice tense.

"Well, perhaps we should ask someone who'd know. Where is the main office of Lango Enterprises?"

"It's off of Chicago Avenue. But how far do you figure on getting with a tightwad like Lango?"

"Farther than we will if we do nothing," Fraser said insistently.

Ray sighed and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. "You know, Fraser," he said in an annoyed tone, "one of these days you're gonna get it through that clump of peat moss on your head that this is why Canada wants no further part of you."

* * *

Leaning back in his office chair in his lavishly appointed study, Thomas Lango beckoned to his assistant for a glass of scotch on the rocks. At the age of sixty-eight, with iron grey hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a shirt that looked like a country club's badge of office, Lango had singularly little tolerance for nonsense. Without breaking his gaze from a lesser mortal sitting on the other side of his mahogany desk, he took the glass of scotch from his assistant and quaffed it with nary a fluttering eyelid.

"Where do we stand with the Concordia Woods project?" he asked.

"We sent a couple of the south side's finest over to Alderman Flynn's flat in Highland Park," the aide said. "By this time tomorrow I think he'll be ready to come around."

"Sure about that, are you?"

"Pretty sure."

"You'd better be. I've had my eye on that property for a long damn while, and my line of credit right under it. And if I'm about to take a loss...."

"Flynn will come around," the aide said confidently. "I imagine that happens to a man when you pour kerosene all over his front steps and then stand at his door with a cigarette lighter in your hand."

"Check with them first thing tomorrow." Lango clammed up with annoyance as a loud and insistent jangle emanated from the phone resting on an end table next to the aide's chair. The phone itself looked like it belonged in John Dillinger's private collection.

"If that's the chairman of the Save the Otters Society again, tell him I'm taking a leak," Lango snapped. "A long and satisfying one!"

With a hasty nod, the aide picked up the phone. "Thomas Lango's office," he answered. "Yes. Yes, of course he is." He got up and held the receiver across the desk, shaking his head.

Lango snatched the receiver and scowled at the aide as he sat back in his chair again. "Lango," he answered. "What's that? Well, who the hell is it? Oh, that's a new one on me. A cop and a Mountie demanding a personal meeting." He paused, rolling his eyes as he listened to the response from the security guard at the front gate.

"Nah, let 'em come in. They want to deal with me personally, I'll deal with them." He hung up the phone and nodded to his aide. "You heard?"

The aide nodded back with a small and yet amoral smile. "Yes, sir, we'll take care of it."

 

Ray couldn't help shaking his head at the sight of the Lango Enterprises office complex - a tall-standing, expensive-looking glass affair occupying one corner of an industrial park on the upper west side. "Any idea what you're gonna say to him?" Ray asked as he drove slowly past the front gate.

"I think just mentioning the names Hannah Emerson and Slade McCorrie should be more than enough to incur a reaction from him," Fraser posited.

"Ohhhh, looks like we've incurred one already," Ray said, nodding toward the main entrance. Two men were approaching them from it: they had encountered neither man in the shelter's passageway, but they gave Ray the screaming woo-hoos all the same. He immediately diverted away from the main entrance and made tracks to the side of the building, proceeding around to the back, and pausing a few metres away from a shipping and receiving dock. He kept a weather eye on the rearview mirror for a sign of the two interlopers, but Fraser, with no side mirror next to him, instead brought his sights to bear on a white pickup truck - with rail wheels mounted on both bumpers - parked near the dock.

"Ray...." Fraser said, pointing animatedly at the truck. "The demon!"

"Oh, great, now she's got you doing it, too?"

"No, look. Look at that herald." Fraser pointed at the logo on the side of the truck, a stylised letter "D" whose vertical bar was drawn as a railroad track receding into the distance, the roadname "Dearborn Rail System" spelt out underneath it. "She didn't mean _a_ demon, she meant the _D-men!_ That's why she insists that it's a plural! It was railroad personnel who tried to kill her!"

"Histler," Ray snarled, as if the name was a spoilt jalapeno pepper falling off his tongue. "I _knew_ he was up to no good! Hang onto your hat, Benny!"

"Understood," Fraser said. He barely had time to withdraw his Stetson from the dashboard and put it in his lap before Ray mightily slammed on the accelerator and made back off for the gate.

They reached the Bensenville yard office with the red light flashing and the Riviera's engine athunder. Ray stopped the car twenty feet away from a locomotive with a low-chopped short hood, the same "D" logo visible on its nose. Neither man needed to remind the other of Hannah's reaction to an unseen terror shortly after she'd been hit: she must have seen the logo on the front of the engine and remembered it as an identifying feature of her would-be killers. As they marched purposefully toward the front door, they ignored the small gathering of yard workers in front of the office until Rob Stanoski stepped out of the gathering, waving to get their attention.

"What are you doin' here, Rob?" Ray asked without breaking his stride.

"Well, word gets around fast in this business," Stanoski said. "So I sniffed around a little and I wanted to tell you guys what I picked up. Remember there wasn't any opposing traffic the night we hit that girl? I found out it was really 'cause the northbound main track got taken out of service almost an hour after we came on duty."

"Do you know why?" Fraser enquired.

"All I know is that a section foreman had charge of the track. He was out there with a high-rail truck, so all I can figure is that it was a track patrol of some kind. Dunno if that tells you guys anything...."

"It may tell us everything," Fraser said. "You're sure it was after you came on duty?"

"We came on at eighteen hundred, the track got pulled out of service at eighteen fifty-two."

"That explains the lack of footprints," Fraser said. Moving single file like a battering ram, they barged inside and up the creaking, splitting wooden stairs.

Ray roughly shoved a protesting clerk out of his way as he marched across the main office, not quite five seconds before he kicked open the door to Histler's office and leapt inside with gun drawn. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of the draconian superintendent in person: but Fraser, striding over to the back side of the desk, needed only one glance at the arrayed mess of papers and photographs on the desktop. Most of the photographs, taken unawares, were of railroad employees engaged in everyday activities, some slightly more precarious than others - but beneath them Fraser found a torn-out page from a magazine. At one edge of the page, a sidebar displayed a beautifully composed portrait of Hannah - a self-portrait, Fraser had little doubt - and an article, titled "Angel Eyes," about her artistic excellence. The yellow Post-It memo adhering to the page beside it, however, drew much more of his attention.

 

_Amos,_

_This girl is on the verge of singlehandedly shutting down the Belmont Park intermodal expansion before we can even start grading for it. If you don't do something about her, her so-called "angel eyes" are bound to see a sum of money I'm not willing to part with get flushed down the drain._

_Whether you're in for penny or pound, GET HER OUT OF THE WAY RIGHT NOW._

_\- Thomas_

 

"Whaddya got?" Ray asked.

Fraser held up the page and the attached memo, staring at Ray with a look of utter disgust. "Heavy industry attempts to claim yet another innocent life."

"Ohhh, dear." Ray hadn't meant to mock Fraser, but even if pressed, he would have vigourously denied doing so.

"Entering this, I believe we'll find Mr. Lango is a part, if not whole, owner of Dearborn Rail System." Turning to Stanoski, Fraser next showed him the memo. "The trail to your encounter with Miss Emerson begins at the former engine terminal at Franklin Park yard. And there's an excellent chance she and Slade have been taken there against their will."

"Well, come on, then." Stanoski beckoned and led the way out of the office, down the stairs, and into a dusty, dilapidated locker room on the building's lower floor. He made a beeline for his own locker, yanked it open, and reached for the upper shelf. "Here, you're gonna need this."

He handed Ray a strange-looking, shaft-like black plastic object with a notch cut into its narrow end. Ray took the tool from him and stared at it as if it was covered in undecipherable written gibberish. "What's this?" he asked.

"Trust me," Stanoski said firmly. "You'll need it."

* * *

Ever since Slade saw the run-down engine house and back shop that had once dominated the Franklin Park engine terminal, he'd been trying not to think about what would happen to him and Hannah. Under the watchful eye of the third thug, who lurked from one end of the empty, cavernous shop to the other, they sat side by side on a rusted lathe, watching their captors working on top of a string of freight cars parked on one of the old inspection tracks. They'd been hauled out the exit at the other end of the fallout shelter and tossed into a van to be toted to the terminal: Hannah hadn't said two words since, but her lovely face had been contorted into a look of perpetual terror. No adversity she'd faced in her early life had been anywhere near as perilous as that which surrounded them now.

Slade felt moisture creep to his eye as he heard Hannah's soft sniffle next to him. "It was always going to get me killed," her voice was scarcely above a whisper.

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe my daddy was right, something really has been wrong with me all these years. I'd be drawing my own Fantasia. 'Hannah, you're wasting your life.' I'd want to go to bed wearing a Halloween costume. 'Hannah, get your head out of the clouds.' He was so mad, always so mad at me for everything, I thought I wouldn't live to see double digits. Then he left when I was little, and I thought the thunderheads had broken finally and I was going to live, until....until now...." She gulped, leaned slightly against him and massaged her injured arm. The thugs had long since done away with both sling and brace to prevent Slade from improvising them into a weapon of any sort. "Do you pray?" she asked.

"Not much. Maybe not as much as I should. Way I figure it, God is gonna do whatever He's gonna do and there's no point in trying to change His mind. How do you feel about it?"

"I used to pray that my daddy would learn to love me the way I was. But I never saw him again. I learned early on that God answers some prayers with 'no'."

Slade didn't know what to say. As much as he wanted to comfort her, there was little comfort he could offer in their situation. Slow and hesitant, he allowed his arm to slip up around her and bring her head to rest on his shoulder. He tried not to tremble, much less allow Hannah to feel him trembling, as he stared at the five freight cars parked on the inspection track in front of them. The last two cars were a walled flatcar and a boom crane coupled behind, vestiges of a train used for wreck clean-up: on the flatcar's deck stood a jawed scoop underneath the crane's hook, awaiting a call to action. The first two cars were boxcars, adorned with an orange hazard placard denoting explosive cargo. In the middle, a light-grey covered hopper car sported a white and yellow placard bearing the number 1495 - sodium chlorate. Slade's heart sank: he could see from the elliptical springs on the wheelsets that all three cars were loaded. One way or another, he and Hannah were going to perish in flames.

But at least they would perish together.

Steever and DeNorden had finished opening the hatches on top of the hopper car: elsewhere in the shop, Slade could make out Histler's voice, as unintelligible and disembodied as it was raspy and irritating, holding a one-sided conversation on a mobile phone. The two hoods descended the ladder from the roof of the car and formed a triangle with their pal around Hannah and Slade.

"It was always going to get me killed," Hannah whispered again, her voice catching. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, but she knew deep down that the nightmare would still be alive and well when she opened them. It no longer mattered if she let Slade see her cry or not. And so she let the tears well up and trickle, one by one.

Presently Histler appeared at the back end of the crane car, ended his phone call, and sauntered over to the lathe, grinning fiendishly at the pair. "This has been waitin' to happen ever since you roughed up Jason Willard, and don't think I don't know you're the one that done it," he spat, pointing harshly at Slade.

"Too bad for you there was no proof one way or the other," Slade came back. "But then there's never any proof, is there? Not the way you always destroy the evidence within an hour of somethin' going south on your watch."

"Not that it comes as a surprise, but you don't know what the hell you're talkin' about, you scum-chucking punk."

"Dino Crosetti?" Slade scowled at him. "Teddy Charreau? How about _Kevin Werner?!"_

"Stick it in your ear, McCorrie!" Histler snarled, slapping Slade across the back of his head. "Werner would be alive today if he wasn't dumb enough to be between cars when Edmonds ran the slack in. And don't try'n gimme any crap about a broken rail on the hump. I'm sick of hearing that excuse - " he raised his voice to a falsetto - "'oh, boo-hoo, something broke and now we can't work!'"

"There's a difference between excuses and facts. You damn well know after Crosetti messed up his knee tryin' to line that switch in Roselawn, you went out and lubed it up to cover up the problem before the track guys got there. Just like you and Coleman went and threw a thermite charge into that rail break to seal it up before the FRA got to it. Imagine the headache you coulda saved yourself if you'd just fixed the damn rail to begin with."

"There's no proof of that. There's _never_ proof, you said it yourself. And there won't be no proof this time, either. In fact, there won't be any proof you ever even existed."

"This ain't gonna last, Hitler. Any minute now the cops are gonna show up and shove your fat ass right through the bunter."

"What if I told you that's just what I'm bankin' on?" Histler snickered. "Only trouble for them is, they won't live to report it, neither. Come a day Lango and I will own them, too. Now what say we quit mincin' words and put your pretty little lady there outa her misery. Gimme a hand here, Barto."

Taking his cue, Barto approached from behind them unseen. He grabbed Hannah by her injured arm, and she yelped with pain - though not half so loud as she yelped when he and Histler flung a loop of rusty chain around her.

Instantly Slade jumped off the lathe and bolted at them, but in almost the same second Steever and DeNorden were at his sides, grabbing him by both arms and holding him at bay.

"One more step and it's another knife in your back, sonny," DeNorden hissed in his ear. "This time, _deep!"_

Slade took no notice of the threat, fighting with every muscle to break free and rush Histler in a frenzy. "Let her go or you die right here, you son of a bitch!" he barked.

"Oh, yeah, and who's gonna do the deed, _you?"_ Histler laughed mockingly. "Just try it, scumbag!"

"Don't - " Hannah cried desperately as they continued to wrap the chain around her. "God, no, don't - _Slade!"_

"Save your breath, little darlin'," Histler leered at her. "You ain't got much of it left."

Together he and Barto dragged Hannah toward the inspection track on which the cars sat. Chained from shoulders to hips, she relived in horror her ordeal in the garbage can - but this time Slade wouldn't be able to prevent the inevitable. She could barely get her legs to resist: at the same time, Slade dropped his own legs out from under him, hoping to catch his handlers off guard. His luck was nothing such - they simply dragged him back to his feet, just in time to watch helplessly as Histler and Barto flung Hannah into the grease pit between the rails. Her scream was short - the pit was only two metres deep - but trussed up as she was, it would be a struggle for her to get out of it.

Through with her, Histler and Barto turned and moved in on Slade again.

"Damn union wouldn't even let me fire ya when I had the chance," Histler said with a grimace. "But they can't stop me from killin' ya." At his gesture, Barto moved in and buried his fist deep in Slade's stomach. Under the evil grins of his assailants, the young man folded nearly in half, grunting at the top of his lungs.

"They sure as hell ain't gonna let you get away with it, though," Slade retorted, coughing heavily. He unfolded himself and bared his teeth, holding Histler's gaze.

"Didn't we just talk about this? Proof, ya dumb kid, _proof!_ There ain't gonna be any!"

"Why don't ya run it by _them_ first," Slade rasped.

He made no motion with his head to underline his meaning, but Histler couldn't see it: Steever and DeNorden, even if they could see it, didn't recognise it. Slade, meanwhile, tensed himself to break loose.

All at once the door to the inspection track disintegrated with a great splintering crash of splitting wood and glass. In burst another GP-model road-switcher locomotive, moving at only twelve miles per hour but appearing to move three times that fast in the confines of the doorway and the shop.

Immediately Slade seized the element of surprise. He broke loose and half ran, half stumbled toward the grease pit, still trying to regain his wind after being punched. He caught a split-second glimpse of Fraser at the engine's control stand right before Ray burst through the door of the cab in front of him, marching to the walkway on the back of the engine with his gun drawn: but despite the _deus ex machina_ of their arrival, all Slade could think about was getting to Hannah. Ignoring the imploding distance between engine and cars, he took a clumsy dive into the pit bare seconds before Fraser laid on the brake and the engine coupled onto the cars with an abrupt, ringing clash of steel.

_(Fanmix["The Mystic's Dream" ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf8NUJaCS1Q)by Loreena McKennitt)_

The force of the coupling flung Ray off the stepladder, but he landed cleanly on his feet, weapon ready. "Looks like the end of the line for you bozos," he pronounced.

"'End of the line'," Histler repeated, chortling. "How lame can ya get? Just gimme some original spit for once!"

"Okay, how about 'You have the right to shut your blowhole before you bite yourself in the ass in a court of law'?" Ray offered as Fraser descended the stepladder to join him.

"Perhaps also the right to legal representation in such court," Fraser added, "the affordability of which, in your case, hardly seems questionable."

"Oh, yeah, that's funny," Histler snorted. "Don't you fellas gotta prove I did anything wrong first?"

"Your intentions are clear enough," Fraser said as he and Ray slowly advanced toward the four malfeasians. "To demolish this engine house and the adjacent distribution warehouse, burn half of Belmont Park, and make it look like an accident. Then, once they're levelled, allow a Lango Enterprises contracting crew to pave over the entire area to make way for an intermodal expansion. But when she painted the cityscape from an elevation, Hannah Emerson didn't miss the packages of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil you placed under the warehouse in preparation to blow it up. You first tried to destroy her original work, but when she duplicated it, you tried to destroy her as well. We found the note written to you by Thomas Lango in which he ordered you to, quote, 'get her out of the way right now'."

"Business is business," Histler said coldly. "You wanna get ahead in this world, sometimes you gotta make a sacrifice here and there. But a goody-two-shoes like you wouldn't know too much about that, would you?"

Sensing Fraser's indignation - even clearer than he could sense the spirits of Robert Fraser and Irene Zuko behind them - Ray stared daggers at Histler from behind his gun. "You don't wanna go down that road with us, buster."

"This nefarious scheme is of your making," Fraser said, glaring at Histler with eyes made of steel. "You made sure the northbound main track was out of service so you could occupy it with a high-rail truck. Then you kidnapped Miss Emerson, put her on the truck and brought her to the spot where you placed her in the path of one of your own trains. You went to great trouble to make sure that Slade and Rob were on the crew, and that Miss Emerson wouldn't have time to freeze to death before they hit her. But you counted too heavily on them being unable to stop in time. You tried to use them to end her life, but instead they saved it. Slade recognised the hazard, made an emergency stop and managed to avoid fatally injuring Miss Emerson, thereby absolving himself of the blame you sought to place on him."

"Why don't you just give yourself a cigar right now, Big Red," Histler said, grimacing.

"Thank you, but I don't smoke."

"Not yet, you don't. But once I bring this whole building to the ground...."

"You're not gonna do it through me, pal," Ray growled.

"There's no way out," Fraser pressed on. "You've got nowhere to run. You're unarmed...."

"'Fraid that's where you're wrong, smart guy," Histler sneered. He pulled a fusee from his back pocket and held it up with a menacing grin. "Know what's in this covered hopper over here?"

"It bears the United Nations designation for sodium chlorate."

"Uh-huh. If you know what that stuff is, I bet you know how fast it burns. All I gotta do is light this fusee - " here Histler tore the striker cap from the fusee and poised to ignite it - "and toss it through one of those hatches up there. That car burns to a crisp faster than a Roman candle. And then whaddya think happens to all the ANFO I got stacked up in these boxcars here? So you guys gonna be stupid and make me do it, or are you gonna play it smart and let us get on with our job?"

"Your job, as you see it, is to terminate the life of an innocent young woman," Fraser told him. "I have no intention of letting you carry it out."

"Well, you just made the dumbest choice of all our lives, sonny boy." Grinning like a crocodile, Histler struck the cap on the fusee. Immediately an incandescent red tongue of flame shot from its tip, and he held it vertical, waving it in the direction of the hopper car.

"Hey, guys!" Slade's sharp bark smashed through the wall of tension between them. "Grab some iron! We're gettin' outa here!"

Fraser's was the only reaction that differed from the others. With all focus on the crackling air between sides, none of them had heard Slade releasing Hannah's bonds: nor had they seen him boosting her out of the grease pit before climbing out himself. They hadn't even seen Hannah scampering up the stepladder onto the engine or Slade connecting the air hoses between engine and cars, quietly opening the air valve to their brake line. But Fraser hadn't underestimated either of them and he had managed to hold everyone's attention long enough for them to do what they needed to. Talk time was over and action time had come.

With Slade's exhort, Fraser whipped off his Stetson and flung it with all his might at Histler, knocking the fusee out of his hand.

"You're gonna kill somebody with that hat one of these days!" Ray hollered. He himself opened fire on Steever and his pals, sending them scattering.

In the cab, Slade had just pulled his head back through the conductor's window and leapt across to the engineer's side. Noting with approval the reverser handle sticking out of its socket under the throttle, he slapped it enthusiastically. "You're the man, Rob," he muttered to himself as he shoved it forward. "All right, Hannah honey, sit down, shut up and hold on!"

Hastily Hannah complied to the letter, dropping into the conductor's seat and holding onto the windowsill as Slade advanced the throttle. He'd yanked it out to the third of its eight notches before he released the brake, and the engine jerked forward, taking up the slack from the cars - but still meeting more resistance than Slade was ready for. In desperation he jerked the throttle to the fourth notch, then the fifth.

Fraser rushed at Histler and knocked him clean off his feet before he could retrieve the fusee. Scrambling back upright, he kicked the burning flare into the pit underneath the flatcar, where it fell harmlessly into a puddle of standing water to burn itself out. By the time Histler had untangled himself, Ray had sent his three goonies diving for cover behind the lathe and between two of the cars.

"Barto, get the hell outa there before those cars blow, you idiot!" Histler yelled.

Explosion was the last thing Barto had to worry about, however. An unholy squealing of brake shoes emanated from the crane car as the train began to inch forward, its still-applied handbrake notwithstanding. Ray emptied his clip and began to backpedal toward the engine, hastily digging a fresh clip from his coat pocket. Steever took advantage of the reload break and stood bolt upright behind the lathe, a heavy assault rifle in his hands. Fraser had just retrieved his Stetson from the floor and started after the moving engine, but the first rifle blast forced him to dive into a somersault for his life before he could put the hat back on. He jumped back onto the stepladder as Slade advanced the throttle to the sixth notch, with Ray taking the hint from both the second rifle blast and the rising bellow of the engine that he'd better grab it himself if he wanted to get out of here alive.

He resumed fire as he ran for the stepladder, sending Steever and DeNorden jackknifing back down behind the lathe for cover. Bit by bit, the train picked up speed as the engine's tractive force slowly overcame the crane car's handbrake. Ray emptied his second clip preventing Histler and Barto from coming close enough to jump aboard the train, tossed the gun aside and grabbed his backup gun from his ankle holster. By the time he'd emptied its chambers, the engine had exited the building, Slade had increased to the seventh notch and Histler and his hoods were running for the train again.

Ray re-entered the cab, gritting his teeth as he saw the speedometer registering only four miles per hour. Breathing heavily with determination, Slade slapped the throttle into the eighth and final notch - maximum power. Ray hastened across to the conductor's side, where Hannah clung for dear life to the windowsill and Fraser stood behind her, his feet braced against the rocking. Ray leant out the window in front of Hannah, catching a brief flash of DeNorden and Barto trying to jump on the train - the only thing stopping them was the close clearance between the cars and the door frame, threatening to wipe them off the train's side as quickly as they could embark.

"C'mon, kid!" he shouted at Slade. "They're all over us! You wanna step on it?!"

"I'm doin' it!" Slade shouted back. "This is all I got! It's a steep hill and there's a handbrake still on back there! I didn't really have time to snap it off!"

"I think we can manage it," Fraser said. "Stay your course!" He pushed away from the rear wall and made for the door behind Slade.

"Manage _what?!"_ Ray demanded as he ducked out the door after him. "Stay _what_ course?! Fraser, where the hell are you going?!"

Fraser was headed exactly where Ray dreaded - up the ladder to the engine's roof. Barely maintaining his footing amidst all the rocking and bouncing on the poorly maintained track, he stood fast and took a flying leap onto the roof of the first car. Griping and cursing every step of the way, Ray followed him and howled at the top of his voice as he made the jump, landing facedown on the first car's roof. He mumbled a string of invective regarding Fraser's world record for annoyance as he scrambled back to his feet and ran on after his partner from one roof to the next. The ribbed roofs of the boxcars, however, were not ideal for running on, and only the glacial pace of the train saved Ray from from falling off the side as he ran across them. Naturally, Fraser suffered no such imbalance: but once he jumped onto the covered hopper, he found his path seriously restricted by the open hatches. He leant forward, planted one foot firmly in front of the other, and ran on.

The clamour of the engine was deafening as it struggled to pull its load up the hill from the engine terminal with a handbrake still applied. Nonetheless, Barto had been able to jump on the crane car before it exited the building: by the time Fraser and Ray reached the trailing end of the hopper car, Histler and the other two had caught up, boarding the crane car and then the flatcar by leaps and bounds. Histler, however, needed assistance with both boardings.

The crane's boom overhung the flatcar far enough that Fraser could probably have grabbed hold of it from the hopper's roof, had it been elevated sufficiently. He had to settle for dropping a few rungs down the ladder on the end of the hopper car, seeing DeNorden and Barto rushing at him, and leaping from the ladder to grab the crane's hook in midair. He swung apelike from hook and cable and rammed both his feet directly into Barto's chest. The howl of a startled jackal burst from Barto's throat as he catapulted clear over the wall of the flatcar and hit the ground flat on his back, straight out of action.

Fraser landed squarely on his feet, but was unprepared for DeNorden's onslaught. With another length of chain in his hands, DeNorden backswung, but didn't have time to lash out with it before Ray came roaring off the roof of the hopper car and tackled him to the flatcar's deck, rolling quickly away from him. Fraser was about to lend him a helping hand, but at the sight of Histler and Steever approaching from the trailing end of the car, he scooped up a two-by-four from the deck and rushed to intercept. He held it out crosswise in front of him, catching Steever in the gut and Histler in the chest. Steever scarcely recoiled, but Histler fell backward off his feet, barely breaking his fall in time. Fraser spun around and all but broke the two-by-four across Steever's back.

Satisfied that Fraser had his hands full, Histler shoved himself up to his knees and then to his feet. Steever and DeNorden had done what he'd paid them to do. All he had to do now was get to the cab and make sure that his and Lango's little secret stayed kept. He hustled forward, sniggering to himself at the sight of Ray locked in mortal combat with DeNorden, and made for the ladder on the end of the hopper car.

Ray saw Histler's gambit, but he was too busy slugging it out with DeNorden to try and stop him. From a prone position on the deck of the flatcar, DeNorden tripped him up cleanly with a loop of rope, but in response Ray grabbed an empty pail and clobbered DeNorden over the head with it. As they resumed their feet, DeNorden took a swing which Ray neatly blocked with the pail's lid and then brought it hard across the side of his enemy's head.

Steever had armed himself with a pair of rusty old rail spikes and taken swing after swing at Fraser, forcing him into dodge after dodge. Finally Fraser went into a low, crouching spin and grabbed a pair of old tie plates from the deck: with these he deflected Steever's swings, trying to get into position to crack him over the head, until Steever abandoned the tactic in favour of hurling one spike at Fraser's face. Without a flinch, Fraser knocked it away with one of his tie plates and then copycatted Steever by throwing it at him, catching him on the temple with one of the plate's flat sides.

Slade's teeth ground like a gristmill as he watched the engine's speedometer. The old, tired locomotive still battled both hill and brake at twelve miles per hour - almost three times the speed Slade was comfortable with, given the track conditions. He kept a weather eye on the amperage meter as well, but it showed no sign of the wheels slipping. Then Hannah dared to take a look through her window and a glance to the rear.

At once she froze with terror.

 _"Slade!"_ she cried. "Slade, he's coming up and he's breathing fire!"

Shooting a look of his own aft, Slade snarled under his breath at the sight of Histler jumping roofs from the second car to the first. "Ah, you _bastard!"_ he snapped. At Hannah, he shouted: "Get outa here! Get up front and stay there! I got him! Go on, _go!"_ He jumped from his seat and scuttled around behind the control stand, bracing himself in preparation to deal with the demon. Meanwhile, Hannah pounced for the door to the engine's side walkway in front of her: she slammed it shut almost at the same moment as Histler tore open the door on the opposite side.

The instant Hannah leapt out of the cab, the earsplitting scream of the engine's main generator nearly overpowered her. Hands clapped round her head, she wailed with distress and ran blindly forward, eyes squeezed shut, ears pressed with all her strength, until the unbearable noise of the generator and prime mover were behind her. She ran to the walkway on the engine's front end and crouched, puffing, afraid to look back toward the cab for fear of seeing Histler come after her with a blunt object.

Histler, however, was well preoccupied. He and Slade stared serrated swords at each other across the cab, until he reached to one side, grabbed a fusee from the supply box and lit it. He held it menacingly in front of him, the bright red glow giving his face a look more satanic than ever.

"All anyone's ever gonna prove is that you struck this fusee the wrong way and burned yourself alive," he said triumphantly.

"Like anyone's gonna buy that, _Hitler,"_ Slade snorted, tightening his grasp on the top of the control stand.

At the front of the engine, Hannah struck out for the grab irons in a panic, holding herself steady as the engine rocked sharply to the left - she just avoided being thrown off. Histler was similarly caught off guard: Slade had known what he hadn't - the presence of a notorious low spot on the track. Even at ten miles per hour with the throttle wide open, the engine rocked like a seesaw, throwing Histler off balance. Immediately Slade grabbed him by the lapels and let loose a roar reminiscent of a Bengal tiger, hurled Histler across the cab and body-slammed him against the opposite side.

"Prove _this!"_ Slade bellowed, flattening Histler's nose with one well-placed punch. "Prove _this!"_ His other fist crashed into Histler's stomach, doubling him over, giving Slade the leverage to shove him toward the rear wall of the cab and ram his head straight into it. "How about _this!_ Try _this_ on for size, you mutated rat turd!" He hurled Histler to the front wall and in the same motion flung open the door to the storage compartment in the engine's short hood. "I've had _enough_ outa you! Now only one of us is gonna come out of there, you son of a drooling whore!" He collared the yelling Histler and threw him bodily into the storage compartment, diving in after him.

Thus raged three battles on the Franklin Park terminal lead: a worn-out engine against a grade and a brake, a vengeful railroader against a despicable manager, and two police officers against two hard-bitten thugs. Fraser had disarmed Steever and now duked it out with him hand-to-hand: Ray and DeNorden were still in a dead heat. DeNorden was just about to uppercut Ray when the flatcar passed over the low spot and rocked nearly twenty degrees to the left, throwing them both off their feet: but Ray opportunely caught himself on the scoop waiting beneath the hook. There he braced himself and judo-kicked DeNorden deeply in the abdomen, doubling him over.

As DeNorden staggered backward, he collided back-to-back with Steever, whom Fraser had just shoved out of a deadlock after the low spot gave him a chance to kick him in the knee. DeNorden took the worst of the impact and dropped, giving Ray the opening to heave the scoop over on its side, landing it squarely on his enemy's back. With DeNorden completely out of commission, Fraser and Ray took up stance side by side in front of the wobbling Steever: the scene would have called to mind an antelope being confronted by a pair of ravenous lions. Exchanging a smirking and knowing look, Fraser and Ray simultaneously kicked Steever in the chest and sent him toppling over the flatcar's wall.

"Where's Histler?" Fraser asked as he sprang for the leading end of the flatcar.

"I saw him head up front! Let's go get 'im!" Ray answered. He solidly and deliberately stepped on DeNorden's head as he followed Fraser to the ladder.

At the very front of the train, Hannah - not exactly dressed for the weather - clung to the grab irons with all the strength in her good arm and tried to hold in her body heat with the other. Still she felt like vomiting as she relived the fateful night she almost hadn't survived. What yet of this nightmare that showed no signs of ending? She looked up and ahead, wondering desperately how long this wild ride would last.

Then she saw it - a flashing red light marking the end of another train ahead.

She gasped and recoiled, almost falling over. How soon they would run into the stopped train, she had no idea, but already the engine was barking its way off the terminal lead onto the adjoining yard track, picking up speed as the grade evened out. The other train had stopped on the yard track directly ahead: there was no sign of its crew or anyone who would benefit from a warning.

For a moment, panic seized Hannah. Slade had told her to stay up here, but there had been no sign of him or Histler and he obviously hadn't taken any action to slow down. She couldn't possibly jump off the train without being hurt, and still it accelerated toward a rear-end collision - a collision that would surely kill her if she stayed where she was. Finally, however, she reasoned it out: staying here or returning to the cab both offered good chances of an unpleasant death, but only one option offered a certainty of it. She stood up on trembling legs and made haste back along the walkway.

Unknown to each other, Hannah, Fraser, and Ray approached the cab from opposite directions. Hannah squeezed her eyes and ears shut once again as she ran for the door, trying with little success to shut out the throaty roar of the prime mover and the shrill howl of the main generator. Fraser jumped clean from the hopper to the second boxcar, but Ray landed facedown again, cursing as he undulated back upright.

Hannah's hair stood on end as she opened the door and immediately heard a loud grunt and a holler of pain - but she found the cab deserted. Then from the nose compartment she heard Slade's roaring grunts keeping time with Histler's bawls of pain and shock, saw the door rattling in its jamb as a body crashed against it from the opposite side. She didn't want to think about what was going on in there. She spun away, crouching in front of the cab door and looking through its window.

Fraser saw the impending collision half a heartbeat before he jumped from the second boxcar to the first. "Ray!" he shouted, pointing.

"Oh, day just keeps gettin' better and better!" Ray groaned. He followed Fraser across roofs and managed to avoid a full-forward collapse, instead landing on his hands and knees.

Finally Hannah dared to look over her shoulder, even though she could still hear Slade grunting and Histler yelling like a junkyard dog and a fox. She looked ahead to see the tail end of the other train only a few hundred feet away. At the rate they were gaining speed, they would hit it in half a minute or less. She tried to warn Slade, but her voice died in her throat as she heard his wrath gaining power with every unseen body-slam in the closed-off compartment. She couldn't allow her mind to form an image of what was going on behind that door: as she looked away again, her eye fell on a large red lever protruding from the front wall of the cab next to the door. The label beside it hollered EMERGENCY BRAKE VALVE.

She shot a look through the back window of the cab to see Fraser jumping from the first boxcar to the ladder on the rear of the engine. Another look ahead and the rear end of the other train filled almost the entire field of vision. Slade was still giving Histler what's-for and Hannah could hear no trace of mercy behind the closed door. She sucked in a huge breath, held it, and yanked the red lever upward.

All in the same instant, 118,000 cubic centimetres of compressed air evacuated the brake line, the engine fell straight from full power to idle, and the entire train lurched: Ray, losing his balance as he teetered on the roof of the boxcar, barely caught himself against the top rung of the engine's end ladder, crashing into Fraser from behind and pinning him momentarily against the engine's short nose. Both men grunted loudly, but not for another few seconds did Ray's momentum adjust enough for him to untangle himself from Fraser as the train ground to a halt.

"You know, Ray," Fraser gasped as he pushed away from the nose, "I really wish you would impose a limit on your deep-dish-pizza consumption for such instances as this."

"Well, you're sure as all hell not gonna get me hooked on mooseburgers!" Ray retorted. He followed Fraser to the back door of the cab, where they entered to find a scene fresh from a _Karate Kid_ movie: the abrupt stopping force had thrown Slade and Histler out of the storage compartment. Slade had ended up against the front wall of the cab, but Histler had ended up flat on the floor, one hand clapped over his bleeding nose and mouth. Hannah crouched by the front door as if trying to hide from the scene, nearly hyperventilating. As Slade slowly pushed himself back to his feet, he started on Histler again, his bloody fists held aloft - only for Fraser and Ray to pounce on either side of him.

"That's enough, kid!" Ray barked. "I think he's got the idea."

They pushed him back from a renewed assault, able to see for the first time that Histler's nose was almost nonexistent, both his lips were split, his left eye was swelling shut and a number of minor lacerations marred his face. His clothes were stained with blood and no one was interested in its exact point of origin. He held up one hand in feeble defence, showing an abhorrence of Slade that he'd never thought himself capable of showing to any of the train service personnel he'd so despised throughout his life.

But Slade pulled a deep breath and blew it out again, jerking his arms out of Fraser and Ray's grasp. "See?" he told Histler. "That's what happens to you when you don't come out here in the field and hump this job every day."

Histler said nothing, just coughed and spat on the floor of the cab. Neither Fraser nor Ray showed him any measure of sympathy - Ray merely nudged Slade aside and moved over to Histler, pulling out his handcuffs. Fraser, meanwhile, moved over to Hannah and helped her up, administering a reassuring squeeze to her good arm.

"It's all right now, Hannah," he said gently. "It's all over."

Hannah nodded and managed a sickly smile as she glanced obliquely at Histler and then looked up at Slade. However, Slade had long since turned away and bent heavily over the control stand, grasping it in both hands, bowing his head. Fraser eyed him, but he was quiet: having nearly killed Hannah by accident and now Histler on purpose, the younger man would need time to come to terms on his own with what he'd done. Unless someone, somewhere, was willing to help him. Fraser looked at Hannah again, but now her fixed stare remained on the still-open emergency brake valve, her expression disturbed. Who could say what was on her mind? Her unexpected jump into action, or her second brush with fate in a week's time?

She, too, would need a long time to deal with what she'd been through. And she would have a far rougher go of it if she had no one to help her get past it.


	6. Epilogue

After rounding up Histler and his flunkies, the last of the ambulances and police escorts left the scene without any kind of interference from his fellow managers. Indeed, the absence of any other railroad personnel suited Ray just fine - up until Francesca jumped out of one of the police cruisers, camera and portfolio in her hands, doing a 360-degree spin on her heels as she accosted Ray.

"Good grief, bro, why didn't you say anything?!" she demanded. "You have any idea what a business district we could make out of this place? I can see the headline right now! 'Francesca Vecchio, local fashion savant, launches Franklin Park Yardworks'!"

"Listen, Frannie, we got - " Ray started, but Francesca took no notice of him speaking.

"I mean, c'mon, can't you guys see it? That little shanty over there has 'coffee shop' spray-painted all over it! And that big brick building down the hill? A little bracing and shelving and I'll make the biggest shoe superstore in the Northern Hemisphere out of it! Maybe the warehouse next to it...."

As Francesca yammered on, Ray shot a despairing look at Fraser, only to see his friend backing slowly away. When she squealed something about converting the run-down old roundhouse into a dream home for herself and her beau, Fraser all but ran for his life, hastening back to the stopped train to rejoin Hannah and Slade. The former sat on a large flat rock beside the train, contemplating a trapezoidal piece of ballast stone she'd taken from the track bed. The latter leaned on the engine with one arm hooked around a grab iron, not terribly different from his pose just after the collision that had catalysed all this. Both of them were quiet as they mulled over what had just happened to them, and what was still happening between them. Slade stole an occasional glance at Hannah, but not once did she look back.

Finally Slade looked up at Fraser's approach and sucked in a deep and nervous breath. "Guess I'm really in for it now, huh?" he sighed.

"Well, it's fair to say you acted in self-defence," Fraser said reassuringly. "And you managed to retrieve three carloads of intact and overwhelming evidence against both Histler and Lango, to say nothing of the testimony."

"I'm guessin' we'll both have to give some?"

"I don't think it'll be necessary, but should either of you decide it's in your best interests...."

"Well, _my_ interest rate is at an all-time low," Hannah said suddenly. She looked up, tossed her stone aside, and scrunched her eyebrows plaintively at them. "I've got no interest at all. I just want to go home."

"Yes," Fraser said with an understanding smile. "Yes, I would imagine you do."

"The smell's fading away, is it?" Slade said, recalling what Hannah had said to him in her hospital room.

Hannah nodded, but still didn't look at him. "Tea's getting cold."

Slade moved over and held out his hand to pull Hannah to her feet. She stared at the outstretched hand for a long moment before she looked up to see the apologetic half-smile on his face, but still she sat with her fist curled and her expression worried. Fraser slowly licked his lower lip and turned a scrutinous eye to the quiet yet escalating show of emotions between the two of them. He could see Hannah's apprehension of Slade, but just as clearly he could see Slade's growing affection for Hannah. He was genuinely sorry for everything and he wanted to make it up to her by any means necessary. At great length, Hannah visibly swallowed and opened her fist, allowing Slade to pull her upright.

"Excuse us for a moment," Fraser said to Slade. Taking Hannah gently by the arm, he walked her a few paces away from the engine. "You know, Hannah, I understand your desire profoundly. It's been a long time since I was anywhere near home. And if it wasn't for Ray, I wouldn't even have come close."

"Did he point you the way?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. It's a rather long story, takes exactly two hours to tell, but the long and short of it is that Ray accidentally shot me in the back attempting to prevent me from coming to harm." Seeing Hannah's shocked look, Fraser smiled. "I know it sounds strange, but if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here talking to you now."

"Are you afraid of him because of it?"

"Well, I wouldn't use the word 'afraid' - "

"I'm afraid." Tears glistened in the angel eyes. "Slade cares, but he scares. I thought I saw him at the other end of the long rocky road, but...."

"You didn't. If you picture it a different way, you've both been on separate rocky paths all your lives, and they converged into one the other night. But what neither of you has is someone to help you negotiate it. I admit Ray and I don't well understand each other at times, but I can think of no one else who has helped me to adjust to life outside of the far North quite as much."

Hannah rubbed an eye and looked over at Slade, who stood leaning on one of the engine's stepladders, staring hard at the ground. As difficult as it was for her to read people's faces, she could see something bothering him deeply. Everything he'd done, he'd done for her sake, however troubling his means. Especially after this escapade, they both had much to overcome. Maybe Fraser was right - maybe the long, rough-surfaced road awaited both of them together.

"I know it's hard for you to read him," Fraser said quietly. "But I also know he does care about you a great deal. I think a new day is just ahead for you."

"But it's not yellow time yet," Hannah said with a trembling smile. "Not even orange time."

"You have many more of them coming. I believe you'll find them a great deal more rewarding if you can share them with someone who's close by."

* * *

Back at her apartment, Hannah made a beeline for her knocked-over painting and propped it back up, regarding the chunk torn out of it by the shotgun blast. "I'll have to do this all over again," she lamented.

"Not necessarily," Fraser offered in an encouraging tone. "Perhaps there was just a cloud in the sky."

Hannah looked at him, then at the gash in the canvas. Then she smiled. "If you picture it a different way...." she echoed him, her voice trailing off.

"Indeed," Fraser said, pleased that Hannah could see what he meant. Slade and Ray could see it, too, from two very different vantage points - from the breakfast bar near the kitchen area for Slade, and for Ray, an ever-changing perspective as he moved over close to Hannah.

"Love to see the look on your old man's face when he sees who painted this," he said with a wry smile.

Hannah looked at the floor. "He made it abundantly clear when he left that he didn't want anything to do with me."

"Yeah, well, more fool him. Just because you're autistic doesn't mean you've got nothing to offer this world. You prove it every time you do one of these. Do me a favour, willya? Don't forget it." He nodded approvingly and patted Hannah on the arm before he moseyed back to the door.

"Will you be all right?" Fraser enquired.

Hannah nodded. "I think we will."

She'd said it again - _"we_ will." Fraser smiled warmly at her, then at Slade. Nodding his head once, he put his hat on and trailed Ray out of the apartment.

As they walked down the hall to the stairs, Ray turned to Fraser with half a grin. "You know what we oughta do, Benny?"

"I haven't the slightest."

"We oughta come up with a Canadian version of that password."

"A Canadian version?" Fraser's eyebrows rose.

"Yeah, yeah," Ray said with a perceptible tone of enthusiasm. "Grab ourselves a little piece of linguistic history. Whaddya think?"

"I'm not quite sure, Ray, but I'm most interested in what _you_ think."

Grinning, Ray nodded his head extravagantly. "One moose," he said.

"Two pucks," Fraser responded.

"Three Canada geese."

"Four Laurentian oysters."

"Five corpulent caribou." Ray tried not to laugh as he said it.

"Six tapes of Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits."

"Seven thousand Mounted Policemen in full dress red serge."

Fraser grinned. "Eight brass beavers from the sprawling old-growth woods outside of Whitehorse."

"Nine apathetic, asynthetic, copacetic hockey players on gold ice skates with a marked propensity toward professional curling and wrestling."

"Ten miracle spherical parabolical polar bears who all haul poutine around the perimeter of the rim of the rink of the rectory at the very same time."

"....Eh?" Ray finished.

"Bee," Fraser responded.

"See? We got this down cold. Just you make sure you give credit where the credit's due."

* * *

"Well, I'm, uh...." Slade took a deep breath and pushed away from the breakfast bar. "I think I'm gonna split. Just glad to see you home safe."

"You don't have to," Hannah said in earnest. "I wish you'd stay. We aren't finished yet - we're only just starting."

"What do you mean? We've been sharing in this Godawful nightmare that's finally over."

"The nightmare's over. You woke up from it. But I woke up from it and came into a dream."

"What'd you see in it?"

Without looking at him, Hannah crossed to the spot where they'd been sitting together before the nightmare began. She picked up her sketch pad and turned the page, starting anew. As she lined, she hummed softly: then as she textured and shaded, she sang, barely above her breath.

_I've never felt this healthy before_  
_I've never wanted something rational_  
_I am aware now, I am aware now...._  
_You've already won me over, in spite of me_  
_Don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet_  
_And don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are_  
_I couldn't help it, it's all your fault_  


Slade's knees almost folded under him. Hannah had not only angel eyes, but an angel's voice - far softer and more floral than the original singer, almost like a lullaby. The song had only gotten its first airtime a couple of weeks ago, but already she had every lyric and note down cold. And even if the words weren't hers, he'd never thought he would ever hear anything like them. 

Not fifteen minutes and she had completed a sketch of a man and a woman standing at a spot where two paths converged into one. The single path - and its forks - had an infinite number of imperfections in the surface, but it ended at a pier in the far distance, and at the pier rested a square-rigged sailing ship. Turning around, Hannah smiled as she showed Slade the drawing: then she seemed to float over to the painting of the ship in rough seas, the same man and woman clinging to each other on its forecastle. She placed the drawing on the easel in front of the painting and turned to face Slade again.

"A rocky road leading to heavy seas," Slade said offhandedly.

"But like Mr. Pelt said, look at it a different way," Hannah pointed out. "Two rocky roads that merge into one - just like our lives. Long, winding, rocky roads with ruts and potholes and tree roots all sticking out of them, but if we don't take this one, we'll never see if it evens out. But it's blessed with plenty of sunshine, you see? Light and shade where there's Hannah and Slade."

"You rhymed," Slade said with a half-hearted chuckle. "I guess the only question is....does Hannah want anything to do with Slade, after what he did?"

"Slade pulled Hannah out of the fire time and again, and showed the demon what the fire felt like."

"Doesn't mean it was the right thing to do."

"Still....Hannah wants to thank Slade for her life." She moved close to him, but as she reached out to embrace him, she felt him shudder. She saw his face twist, eyes squeezed shut: then he caught his breath, shuddered again and burst out a mighty sob he'd been holding back far, far longer than Hannah knew. He smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, but even as it shook violently, she gripped it, took it in both of hers and held it up to her lips, compassion radiating from her face.

"I'm sorry, Hannah...." Slade choked out between tears. "I'm sorry, God, I'm so sorry...."

"No, Slade, don't...." Hannah whispered, barely audible. "Please, don't."

She slid her hand up to the back of his head, gently she pulled his head down, she kissed him, she kissed him again, and over and over again. As she felt his hair in her fingers she felt his arms come snug around her shoulders and the small of her back. Then finally, he responded, kissed her in return, and kissed her and kissed her again. He shook in her arms, but she held him firmly.

They clung to each other like sleeping sea otters from orange time far into blue time and beyond. What possible future an autistic artist and a shell-shocked railroader could ever have together, neither of them knew, but with every kiss they promised each other they would find out.

**_The_ END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Song lyrics from "Head Over Feet" by Alanis Morissette.)


End file.
